Cartier and TED believe in the power of bold ideas to empower local initiatives to have global impact. To celebrate Cartier’s dedication to launching the ideas of female entrepreneurs into concrete change, TED has curated a special session of talks around the theme “Bold Alchemy” for the Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards, featuring a selection of favorite TED speakers.

Leading up to the session, TED talked with financier, entrepreneur and onetime candidate for president of Iceland, Halla Tómasdóttir, about what influences, inspires and drives her to be bold.

TED: Tell us who you are.Halla Tómasdóttir: I think of myself first and foremost as a change catalyst who is passionate about good leadership and a gender-balanced world. My leadership career started in corporate America with Mars and Pepsi Cola, but since then I have served as an entrepreneur, educator, investor, board director, business leader and presidential candidate. I am married, a proud mother of two teenagers and a dog and am perhaps best described by the title given to me by the New Yorker: “A Living Emoji of Sincerity.”

TED: What’s a bold move you’ve made in your career?HT: I left a high-profile position as the first female CEO of the Iceland Chamber of Commerce to become an entrepreneur with the vision to incorporate feminine values into finance. I felt the urge to show a different way in a sector that felt unsustainable to me, and I longed to work in line with my own values.

TED: Tell us about a woman who inspires you.HT: The women of Iceland inspired me at an early age, when they showed incredible courage, solidarity and sisterhood and “took the day off” (went on a strike) and literally brought the country to its knees — as nothing worked when women didn’t do any work. Five years later, Iceland was the first country in the world to democratically elect a woman as president. I was 11 years old at the time, and her leadership has inspired me ever since. Her clarity on what she cares about and her humble way of serving those causes is truly remarkable.

TED: If you could go back in time, what would you tell your 18-year-old self?HT: I would say: Halla, just be you and know that you are enough. People will frequently tell you things like: “This is the way we do things around here.” Don’t ever take that as a valid answer if it doesn’t feel right to you. We are not here to continue to do more of the same if it doesn’t work or feel right anymore. We are here to grow, ourselves and our society. You are here for a reason: make your life and leadership matter.

The private TED session at Cartier takes place April 26 in Singapore. It will feature talks from a diverse range of global leaders, entrepreneurs and change-makers, exploring topics ranging from the changing global workforce to maternal health to data literacy, and it will include a performance from the only female double violinist in the world.

Adam Grant to Explore the Psychology of Unconventional Workplaces as Host of Upcoming New TED Original Podcast “WorkLife”

Organizational psychologist, professor, bestselling author and TED speaker Adam Grant is set to host a new TED original podcast series titled WorkLife with Adam Grant, which will explore unorthodox work cultures in search of surprising and actionable lessons for improving listeners’ work lives.

Beginning Wednesday, February 28, each weekly episode of WorkLife will center around one extraordinary workplace—from an award-winning TV writing team racing against the clock, to a sports team whose culture of humility propelled it to unexpected heights. In immersive interviews that take place in both the field and the studio, Adam brings his observations to vivid life – and distills useful insights in his friendly, accessible style.

“We spend a quarter of our lives in our jobs. This show is about making all that time worth your time,” says Adam, the bestselling author of Originals, Give and Take, and Option B with Sheryl Sandberg. “In WorkLife, we’lltake listeners inside the minds of some fascinating people in some truly unusual workplaces, and mix in fresh social science to reveal how we can lead more creative, meaningful, and generous lives at work.”

The show marks TED’s latest effort to test new content formats beyond the nonprofit’s signature first-person TED talk. Other recent TED original content experiments include Sincerely, X, an audio series featuring talks delivered anonymously; Small Thing Big Idea, a Facebook Watch video series about everyday designs that changed the world; and the Indian prime-time live-audience television series TED Talks India:Nayi Soch, hosted by Bollywood star and TED speaker Shah Rukh Khan.

“We’re aggressively developing and testing a number of new audio and video programs that support TED’s mission of ‘Ideas Worth Spreading,’” said TED head of media and WorkLife co-executive producer Colin Helms. “In every case, our speakers and their ideas remain the focus, but with fresh formats, styles and lengths, we can reach and appeal to even more curious audiences, wherever they are.”

WorkLife debuts Wednesday, February 28 on Apple Podcasts, the TED Android app, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. Season 1 features eight episodes, roughly 30 minutes each, plus two bonus episodes. It’s sponsored by Accenture, Bonobos, JPMorgan Chase & Co., and Warby Parker. New episodes will be made available every Wednesday.

]]>AdamGrant_2016-headshottedstaffThe Big Idea: How to find and hire the best employeeshttps://blog.ted.com/the-big-idea-how-to-find-and-hire-the-best-employees/
Tue, 06 Feb 2018 21:47:42 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=106938[…]]]>So, you want to hire the best employee for the job? Or perhaps you’re the employee looking to be hired. Here’s some counterintuitive and hyper-intuitive advice that could get the right foot in the door.

Expand your definition of the “right” resume

Here’s the hypothetical situation: a position opens up at your company, applications start rolling in and qualified candidates are identified. Who do you choose? Person A: Ivy League, flawless resume, great recommendations — or Person B: state school, fair amount of job hopping, with odd jobs like cashier and singing waitress thrown in the mix. Both are qualified — but have you already formed a decision?

Well, you might want to take a second look at Person B.

Human resources executive Regina Hartley describes these candidates as “The Silver Spoon” (Person A), the one who clearly had advantages and was set up for success, and “The Scrapper” (Person B), who had to fight tremendous odds to get to the same point.

“To be clear, I don’t hold anything against the Silver Spoon; getting into and graduating from an elite university takes a lot of hard work and sacrifice,” she says. But if it so happens that someone’s whole life has been engineered toward success, how will that person handle the low times? Do they seem like they’re driven by passion and purpose?

Take this resume. This guy never finishes college. He job-hops quite a bit, goes on a sojourn to India for a year, and to top it off, he has dyslexia. Would you hire this guy? His name is Steve Jobs.

That’s not to say every person who has a similar story will ultimately become Steve Jobs, but it’s about extending opportunity to those whose lives have resulted in transformation and growth. Companies that are committed to diversity and inclusive practices tend to support Scrappers and outperform their peers. According to DiversityInc, a study of their top 50 companies for diversity outperformed the S&P 500 by 25 percent.

Shake up the face-to-face time

Once you choose candidates to meet in-person, scrap that old hand-me-down list of interview questions — or if you can’t simply toss them, think about adding a couple more.

Generally, these conversations ping-pong between two basic questions: one of competency or a one of character. To identify the candidates who have substance and not just smarts, business consultant Anthony Tjan recommends that interviewers ask these five questions to illuminate not just skills and abilities, but intrinsic values and personality traits too.

What are the one or two traits from your parents that you most want to ensure you and your kids have for the rest of your life? A rehearsal is not the result you want. This question calls for a bit more thought on the applicant’s end and sheds light on the things they most value. After hearing the person’s initial response, Tjan says you should immediately follow up with “Can you tell me more?” This is essential if you want to elicit an answer with real depth and substance.

What is 25 times 25? Yes, it sounds ridiculous but trust us — the math adds up. How people react under real-time pressure, and their response can show you how they’ll approach challenging or awkward situations. “It’s about whether they can roll with the embarrassment and discomfort and work with me. When a person is in a job, they’re not always going to be in situations that are in their alley,” he says.

Tell me about three people whose lives you positively changed. What would they say if I called them tomorrow? If a person can’t think of single person, that may say a lot for the role you’re trying to fill. Organizations need employees who can lift each other up. When a person is naturally inclined toward compassionate mentorship, it can have a domino effect in an institution.

After an interview, ask yourself (and other team members, if relevant) “Can I imagine taking this person home with me for the holidays?” This may seem overly personal (because, yes it is), but you’ll most likely trigger a gut reaction.

After an interview, ask security or the receptionist: “How was the candidate’s interaction with you?” How a person treats someone they don’t feel they need to impress is important and telling. It speaks to whether they act with compassion and openness and view others as equals.

The New York Times’ Adam Bryant suggests getting away from the standard job interview entirely. Reject the played-out choreography — the conference room, the resume, the “Where do you want to be in five years?” — and feel free to shake it up. Instead, get up and move about to observe how they behave in (and out of) the workplace wild.

Take them on a tour of the office (if you can’t take them out for a meal), he proposes, and if you feel so inclined, introduce them to some colleagues. Shake off that stress, walk-and-talk (as TED speaker Nilofer Merchant also advises) and most important, pay attention!

Are they curious about how everything happens? Do they show interest in what your colleagues do? These markers could be the difference between someone you work with and someone you want to work with. Monster has a series of good questions to asks yourself post-meeting potential candidates.

Ultimately, Tjan and Bryant seem to agree, the art of the interview is a tricky but not impossible balance to strike.

Hire for your company’s values, not its internal culture

There’s a chance you may be tired of reading about diversity and inclusion, that you get the point and we don’t need to keep addressing it. Well, tough. Suck it up. Because we do need to talk about it until there’s literally no need to talk about, until this fundamental issue becomes an overarching non-issue (and preferably before we all sink into the sea). This is a concept that can’t just exist in science fictional universes.

Example A: a sci-fi universe featuring a group of people that could be seen working together in a non-fictional universe.

(Ahem.)

MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito and writer Jeff Howe explain that the best way to prepare for a future of unknown complexity is to build on the strength of our differences. Race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic background and disciplinary training are all important, as are life experiences that produce cognitive diversity (aka different ways of thinking).

Thanks to an increasing body of research, diversity is becoming a strategic imperative for schools, firms and other institutions. It may be good politics and good PR and, depending on an individual’s commitment to racial and gender equity, good for the soul, say Ito and Howe. But in an era in which your challenges are likely to feature maximum complexity as well, it’s simply good management — which marks a striking departure from an age when diversity was presumed to come at the expense of ability.

As TED speaker Mellody Hobson (TED Talk: Color blind or color brave?) says: “I’m actually asking you to do something really simple. I’m asking you to look at the people around you purposefully and intentionally. Invite people into your life who don’t look like you, don’t think like you, don’t act like you, don’t come from where you come from, and you might find that they will challenge your assumptions.”

So, in conclusion, go out and hire someone and give them the opportunity to change the world. Or at least, give them the opportunity to prove that they have the wherewithal to change something for the better.

Print your own pharmaceutical factory. As part of an ongoing quest to make pharmaceuticals easier to manufacture, chemist Lee Cronin and his team at the University of Glasgow have designed a way to 3D-print a portable “factory” for the complicated and multi-step chemical reactions needed to create useful drugs. It’s a grouping of vessels about the size of water bottles; each vessel houses a different type of chemical reaction. Pharmacists or doctors could create specific drugs by adding the right ingredients to each vessel from pre-measured cartridges, following a simple step-by-step recipe. The process could help replace or supplement large chemical factories, and bring helpful drugs to new markets. (Watch Cronin’s TED Talk)

How Amit Sood’s TED Talk spawned the Google Art selfie craze. While Amit Sood was preparing for his 2016 TED Talk about Google’s Cultural Institute and Art Project, his co-presenter Cyril Diagne, a digital interaction artist, suggested that he include a prototype of a project they’d been playing with, one that matched selfies to famous pieces of art. Amit added the prototype to his talk, in which he matched live video of Cyril’s face to classic artworks — and when the TED audience saw it, they broke out in spontaneous applause. Inspired, Amit decided to develop the feature and add it to the Google Arts & Culture app. The new feature launched in December 2017, and it went viral in January 2018. Just like the live TED audience before it, online users loved it so much that the app shot to the number one spot in both the Android and iOS app stores. (Watch Sood’s TED Talk)

A lyrical film about the very real danger of climate change. Funded by a Kickstarter campaign by director and producer Matthieu Rytz, the documentary Anote’s Ark focuses on the clear and present danger of global warming to the Pacific Island nation of Kiribati (population: 100,000). As sea levels rise, the small, low-lying islands that make up Kiribati will soon be entirely covered by the ocean, displacing the population and their culture. Former president Anote Tong, who’s long been fighting global warming to save his country and his constituents, provides one of two central stories within the documentary. The film (here’s the trailer) premiered at the 2018 Sundance Festival in late January, and will be available more widely soon; follow on Facebook for news. (Watch Tong’s TED Talk)

An animated series about global challenges. Sometimes the best way to understand a big idea is on a whiteboard. Throughout 2018, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and his team are producing a six-part whiteboard-animation series that explains key themes in his theology and philosophy around contemporary global issues. The first video, called “The Politics of Hope,” examines political strife in the West, and ways to change the culture from the politics of anger to the politics of hope. Future whiteboard videos will delve into integrated diversity, the relationship between religion and science, the dignity of difference, confronting religious violence, and the ethics of responsibility. (Watch Rabbi Sacks’ TED Talk)

Nobody wins the Google Lunar X Prize competition :( Launched in 2007, the Google Lunar X Prize competition challenged entrepreneurs and engineers to design low-cost ways to explore space. The premise, if not the work itself, was simple — the first privately funded team to get a robotic spacecraft to the moon, send high-resolution photos and video back to Earth, and move the spacecraft 500 meters would win a $20 million prize, from a total prize fund of $30 million. The deadline was set for 2012, and was pushed back four times; the latest deadline was set to be March 31, 2018. On January 23, X Prize founder and executive chair Peter Diamandis and CEO Marcus Shingles announced that the competition was over: It was clear none of the five remaining teams stood a chance of launching by March 31. Of course, the teams may continue to compete without the incentive of this cash prize, and some plan to. (Watch Diamandis’ TED Talk)

15 photos of America’s journey towards inclusivity. Art historian Sarah Lewis took control of the New Yorker photo team’s Instagram last week, sharing pictures that answered the timely question: “What are 15 images that chronicle America’s journey toward a more inclusive level of citizenship?” Among the iconic images from Gordon Parks and Carrie Mae Weems, Lewis also includes an image of her grandfather, who was expelled from the eleventh grade in 1926 for asking why history books ignored his own history. In the caption, she tells how he became a jazz musician and an artist, “inserting images of African Americans in scenes where he thought they should—and knew they did—exist.” All the photos are ones she uses in her “Vision and Justice” course at Harvard, which focuses on art, race and justice. (Watch Lewis’ TED Talk)

Have a news item to share? Write us at contact@ted.com and you may see it included in this weekly round-up.

TED is always looking for new voices with fresh ideas — and earlier this winter, we opened a challenge to the world: make a one-minute audition video that makes the case for your TED Talk. More than 1,200 people applied to be a part of the Idea Search program this year, and on Wednesday night at our New York headquarters, 13 audition finalists shared their ideas in a fast-paced program. Here are voices you may not have heard before — but that you’ll want to hear more from soon.

Forensic evidence isn’t as clear-cut as you think. For years, forensic science research has focused on making it easier and more accurate to figure out what a trace — such as DNA or a jacket fiber — is and who it came from, but that doesn’t help us interpret what the evidence means. “What we need to know if we find your DNA on a weapon or gunshot residue on you is how did it get there and when did it get there,” says forensic scientist Ruth Morgan. These gaps in understanding have real consequences: forensic evidence is often misinterpreted and used to convict people of crimes they didn’t commit. Morgan and her team are committed to finding ways to answer the why and how, such as determining whether it’s possible to get trace evidence on you during normal daily activities (it is) and how trace DNA can be transferred. “We need to dramatically reduce the chance of forensic evidence being misinterpreted,” she says. “We need that to happen so that you never have to be that innocent person in the dock.”

The intersection of our senses. An experienced composer and filmmaker, Philip Clemo has been on a quest to determine if people can experience imagery with the same depth that they experience music. Research has shown that sound can impact how we perceive visuals, but can visuals have a similarly profound impact? In his live performances, Clemo and his band use abstract imagery in addition to abstract music to create a visual experience for the audience. He hopes that people can have these same experiences in their everyday lives by quieting their minds to fully experience the “visual music” of our surrounding environment — and improve our connection to our world.

Reading the Bible … without omission. At a time when he was a recovering fundamentalist and longtime atheist, David Ellis Dickerson received a job offer as a quiz question writer and Bible fact-checker for the game show The American Bible Challenge. Among his responsibilities: coming up with questions that conveniently ignored the sections of the Bible that mention slavery, concubines and incest. The omission expectations he was faced with made him realize that evangelicals read the Bible in the same way they watch reality television: “with a willing, even loving, suspension of disbelief.” Now, he invites devout Christians to read the Bible in its most unedited form, to recognize its internal contradictions and to grapple with its imperfections.

Danielle Bilot Bilot suggests three simple but productive actions we can take to help bees: plant flowers that bloom year-round, leave bare areas of soil for bees to nest in, and plant flower patches so that bees can more easily locate food. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

To bee or not to bee? The most famous bee species of recent memory has overwhelmingly been the honey bee. For years, their concerning disappearance has made international news and been the center of research. Environmental designer Danielle Bilot believes that the honey bee should share the spotlight with the 3,600 other species that pollinate much of the food we eat every day in the US, such as blueberries, tomatoes and eggplants. Honey bees, she says, aren’t even native to North America (they were originally brought over from Europe) and therefore have a tougher time successfully pollinating these and many other indigenous crops. Regardless of species, human activity is harming them, and Bilot suggests three simple but productive actions we can take to make their lives easier and revive their populations: plant flowers that bloom year-round, leave bare areas of soil for bees to nest in, and plant flower patches so that bees can more easily locate food.

What if technology protected your hearing? Computers that talk to us and voice-enabled technology like Siri, Alexa and Google Home are changing the importance of hearing, says ear surgeon Matthew Bromwich. And with more than 500 million people suffering from disabling hearing loss globally, the importance of democratizing hearing health care is more relevant than ever. “How do we use our technology to improve the clarity of our communication?” Bromwich asks. He and his team have created a hearing testing technology called “SHOEBOX,” which gives hearing health care access to more than 70,000 people in 32 countries. He proposes using technology to help prevent this disability, amplify sound clarity, and paint a new future for hearing.

Welcome to the 2025 Technology Design Awards, with your host, Tom Wujec. Rocking a glittery dinner jacket, design guru Tom Wujec presents a science-fiction-y awards show from eight years into the future, honoring the designs that made the biggest impact in technology, consumer goods and transportation — capped off by a grand impact award chosen live onstage by an AI. While the designs seem fictional — a hacked auto, a self-rising house, a cutting-edge prosthetic — the kicker to Tom’s future award show is that everything he shows is in development right now.

In collaboration with the MIT Media Lab, Nilay Kulkarni used his skills as a self-taught programmer to build a simple tech solution to prevent human stampedes during the Kumbh Mela, one of the world’s largest crowd gatherings, in India. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

A 15-year-old solves a deadly problem with a low-cost device. Every four years, more than 30 million Hindus gather for the Kumbh Mela, the world’s largest religious gathering, in order to wash themselves of their sins. Once every 12 years, it takes place in Nashik, a city on the western coast of India that ordinarily contains 1.5 million residents. With such a massive crowd in a small space, stampedes inevitably happen, and in 2003, 39 people were killed during the festival in Nashik. In 2014, then-15-year-old Nilay Kulkarni decided he wanted to find a solution. He recalls: “It seemed like a mission impossible, a dream too big.” After much trial and error, he and collaborators at the MIT Media Lab came up with a cheap, portable, effective stampede stopper called “Ashioto” (meaning footstep in Japanese): a pressure-sensor-equipped mat which counts the number of people stepping on it and sends the data over the internet to authorities so they can monitor the flow of people in real time. Five mats were deployed at the 2015 Nashik Kumbh Mela, and thanks to their use and other innovations, no stampedes occurred for the first time ever there. Much of the code is now available to the public to use for free, and Kulkarni is trying to improve the device. His dream: for Ashiotos to be used at all large gatherings, like the other Kumbh Melas, the Hajj and even at major concerts and sports events.

A new way to think about health care. Though doctors and nurses dominate people’s minds when it comes to health care, Tamekia MizLadi Smith is more interested in the roles of non-clinical staff in creating in creating effective and positive patient experiences. As an educator and spoken word poet, Smith uses the acronym “G.R.A.C.E.D.” to empower non-clinical staff to be accountable for data collection and to provide compassionate care to patients. Under the belief that compassionate care doesn’t begin and end with just clinicians, Smith asks that desk specialists, parking attendants and other non-clinical staff are trained and treated as integral parts of well-functioning health care systems.

Mad? Try some humor. “The world seems humor-impaired,” says comedian Judy Carter. “It just seems like everyone is going around angry: going, ‘Politics is making me so mad; my boss is just making me so mad.'” In a sharp, zippy talk, Carter makes the case that no one can actually make you mad — you always have a choice of how to respond — and that anger actually might be the wrong way to react. Instead, she suggests trying humor. “Comedy rips negativity to shreds,” she says.

Want a happier, healthier life? Look to your friends. In the relationship pantheon, friends tend to place third in importance (after spouses and blood relatives). But we should make them a priority in our lives, argues science writer Lydia Denworth. “The science of friendship suggests we should invest in relationships that deliver strong bonds. We should value people who are positive, stable, cooperative forces,” Denworth says. While friendship was long ignored by academics, researchers are now studying it and finding it provides us with strong physical and emotional benefits. “In this time when we’re struggling with an epidemic of loneliness and bitter political divisions, [friendships] remind us what joy and connection look like and why they matter,” Denworth says.

An accessible musical wonderland. With quick but impressive musical interludes, Matan Berkowitz introduces the “Airstrument” — a new type of instrument that allows anyone to create music in a matter of minutes by translating movement into sound. This technology is part of a series of devices Berkowitz has developed to enable musicians with disabilities (and anyone who wants to make music) to express themselves in non-traditional ways. “Creation with intention,” he raps, accompanied by a song created on the Airstrument. “Now it’s up to us to wake up and act.”

Divya Chander shares her work studying what human brains look like when they lose and regain consciousness. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Where does consciousness go when you’re under anesthesia?Divya Chander is an anesthesiologist, delivering specialized doses of drugs that put people in an altered state before surgery. She often wonders: Where do peoples brains do while they’re under? What do they perceive? The question has led her into a deeper exploration of perception, awareness and consciousness itself. In a thoughtful talk, she suggests that we have a lot to learn about consciousness … that we could learn by studying unconsciousness.

The art of creation without preparation. To close out the night, vocalist and improviser Lex Empress creates coherent lyrics from words written by audience members on paper airplanes thrown onto the stage. Empress is accompanied by virtuoso pianist and producer Gilian Baracs, who also improvises everything he plays. Their music reminds us to enjoy the great improvisation that is life.

]]>TED Ideas Search event at TEDNYC Theater, 2018brumulyNew clues about the most mysterious star in the universe, and more news from TED speakershttps://blog.ted.com/new-clues-about-the-most-most-mysterious-star-in-the-universe-and-more-news-from-ted-speakers/
Thu, 18 Jan 2018 16:14:14 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=106892[…]]]>

As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights.

New clues about the most mysterious star in the universe.KIC 8462852 (often called“Tabby’s star,” after the astronomer Tabetha Boyajian, who led the first study of the star) intermittently dims as much as 22% and then brightens again, for a reason no one has yet quite figured out. This bizarre occurrence led astronomers to propose over a dozen theories for why the star might be dimming, including the fringe theory that it was caused by an alien civilization using the planet’s energy. Now, new data shows that the dimming isn’t fully opaque; certain colors of light are blocked more than others. Thissuggests that what’s causing the star to dim is dust. After all, if an opaque object — like a planet or alien megastructure — was passing in front of the star, all of the light would be blocked equally. Tabby’s star is due to become visible again in late February or early March of 2018. (Watch Boyajian’s TED Talk)

TED’s new video series celebrates the genius design of everyday objects.What do the hoodie, the London Tube Map, the hyperlink, and the button have in common? They’re everyday objects, often overlooked, that have profoundly influenced the world around us. Each 3- to 4- minute episode of TED’s original video series Small Thing Big Idea celebrates one of these objects, with a well-known name in design explaining what exactly makes it so great. First up is Michael Bierut on the London Tube Map. (Watch the first episode here and tune in weekly on Tuesday for more.)

The science of black holes. In the new PBS specialBlack Hole Apocalypse, astrophysicist Janna Levin explores the science of black holes, what they are, why they are so powerful and destructive, and what they might tell us about the very origin of our existence. Dubbing them the world’s greatest mystery, Levin and her fellow scientists, including astronomer Andrea Ghez and experimental physicist Rainer Weiss, embark on a journey to portray the magnitude and importance of these voids that were long left unexplored and unexplained. (Watch Levin’s TED Talk, Ghez’s TED Talk, and read Weiss’ Ideas piece.)

An organized crime thriller with non-fiction roots. McMafia, a television show starring James Norton, premiered in the UK in early January. The show is a fictionalized account of Misha Glenny’s 2008 non-fiction book of the same name. The show focuses on Alex Goldman, the son of an exiled Mafia boss who wants to put his family’s history behind him. Unfortunately, a murder foils his plans and to protect his family, he must face up to various international crime syndicates. (Watch Glenny’s TED Talk)

Inside the African-American anti-abortion movement. In her new documentary for PBS’ Frontline, Yoruba Richen examines the complexities of the abortion debate as it relates to US’ racial history. Richen speaks with African-American members of both the pro-life and the anti-abortion movements, as her short doc follows a group of anti-abortion activists as they work in the black community. (Watch Richen’s TED Talk.)

Have a news item to share? Write us at contact@ted.com and you may see it included in this weekly round-up.

Each 3- to 4-minute weekly episode takes a brief but delightful look at the lasting genius of one everyday object – a pencil, for example, or a hoodie – and explains how it is so perfectly designed that it’s actually changed the world around it.

The series features some of design’s biggest names, including fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, museum curator Paola Antonelli, and graphic designer Michael Bierut sharing their infectious obsession with good design.

What made this short talk so impactful? My colleagues and I were curious. We are professional speaker coaches who’ve worked with many, many TED speakers, analyzing their scripts and their presentation styles to help each person make the greatest impact with their idea. And when we sat down and looked at Oprah’s talk, we saw a lot of commonality with great TED Talks.

Among the elements that made this talk so effective:

A strong opening that transports us. Oprah got on stage to give a “thank you” speech for a lifetime achievement award. But she chose not to start with the “thank you.” Instead she starts with a story. Her first words? “In 1964, I was a little girl sitting on the linoleum floor of my mother’s house in Milwaukee.” Just like a great story should, this first sentence transports us to a different time and place, and introduces the protagonist. As TED speaker Uri Hasson says: Our brain loves stories. Oprah’s style of opening signals to the audience that it’s story time, by using the opening similar to any fairy tale: “Once upon a time” (In 1964) “There was a princess” (I was a little girl) “In a land far far away” (…my mother’s house in Milwaukee.”

Alternating between ideas and anecdotes. A great TED Talk illustrates an idea. And, just like Oprah does in her talk, the idea is illustrated through a mix of stories, examples and facts. Oprah tells a few anecdotes, none longer than a minute. But they are masterfully crafted, to give us, the audience, just enough detail to invite us to imagine it. When TED speaker Stefan Larsson tells us an anecdote about his time at medical school, he says: “I wore the white coat” — one concrete detail that allows us, the audience, to imagine a whole scene. Oprah describes Sidney Poitier with similar specificity – down to the detail that “his tie was white.” Recy Taylor was “walking home from a church service.” Oprah the child wasn’t sitting on the floor but on the “linoleum floor.” Like a great sketch artist, a great storyteller draws a few defined lines and lets the audience’s imagination fill in the rest to create the full story.

A real conversation with the audience. At TED, we all know it’s called a TED talk — not “speech,” not “lecture.” We feel it when Sir Ken Robinson looks at the audience and waits for their reaction. But it’s mostly not in the words. It’s in the tone, in the fact that the speaker’s attention is on the audience, focusing on one person at a time, and having a mini conversation with us. Oprah is no different. She speaks to the people in the room, and this intimacy translates beautifully on camera.

It’s Oprah’s talk — and only Oprah’s. A great TED talk, just like any great talk or speech, is deeply connected to the person delivering it. We like to ask speakers, “What makes this a talk that only you can give?” Esther Perel shares anecdotes from her unique experience as a couples therapist, intimate stories that helped her develop a personal perspective on love and fidelity. Only Ray Dalio could tell the story of personal failure and rebuilding that lies behind the radical transparency he’s created in his company. Uri Hasson connects his research on the brain and stories to his own love of film. Oprah starts with the clearest personal angle – her personal story. And along her speech she brings her own career as an example, and her own way of articulating her message.

A great TED Talk invites the audience to think and to feel. Oprah’s ending is a big invitation to the audience to act. And it’s done not by telling us what to do, but by offering an optimistic vision of the future and inviting us all to be part of it.

The TED Fellows program is excited to announce the new group of TED2018 Fellows and Senior Fellows.

Representing a wide range of disciplines and countries — including, for the first time in the program, Syria, Thailand and Ukraine — this year’s TED Fellows are rising stars in their fields, each with a bold, original approach to addressing today’s most complex challenges and capturing the truth of our humanity. Members of the new Fellows class include a journalist fighting fake news in her native Ukraine; a Thai landscape architect designing public spaces to protect vulnerable communities from climate change; an American attorney using legal assistance and policy advocacy to bring justice to survivors of campus sexual violence; a regenerative tissue engineer harnessing the body’s immune system to more quickly heal wounds; a multidisciplinary artist probing the legacy of slavery in the US; and many more.

The TED Fellows program supports extraordinary, iconoclastic individuals at work on world-changing projects, providing them with access to the global TED platform and community, as well as new tools and resources to amplify their remarkable vision. The TED Fellows program now includes 453 Fellows who work across 96 countries, forming a powerful, far-reaching network of artists, scientists, doctors, activists, entrepreneurs, inventors, journalists and beyond, each dedicated to making our world better and more equitable. Read more about their visionary work on the TED Fellows blog.

Below, meet the group of Fellows and Senior Fellows who will join us at TED2018, April 10–14, in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Laura L. Dunn (USA)Victims’ rights attorney
Attorney and Founder of SurvJustice, a national nonprofit increasing the prospect of justice for survivors of campus sexual violence through legal assistance, policy advocacy and institutional training.

Rola Hallam (Syria | UK)Humanitarian aid entrepreneur
Medical doctor and founder of CanDo, a social enterprise and crowdfunding platform that enables local humanitarians to provide healthcare to their own war-devastated communities.

Olga Iurkova (Ukraine)Journalist + editorJournalist and co-founder of StopFake.org, an independent Ukrainian organization that trains an international cohort of fact-checkers in an effort to curb propaganda and misinformation in the media.

Glaciologist M Jackson studies glaciers like this one — the glacier Svínafellsjökull in southeastern Iceland. The high-water mark visible on the mountainside indicates how thick the glacier once was, before climate change caused its rapid recession. (Photo: M Jackson)

M Jackson (USA)Geographer + glaciologist
Glaciologist researching the cultural and social impacts of climate change on communities across all eight circumpolar nations, and an advocate for more inclusive practices in the field of glaciology.

Romain Lacombe (France)Environmental entrepreneur
Founder of Plume Labs, a company dedicated to raising awareness about global air pollution by creating a personal electronic pollution tracker that forecasts air quality levels in real time.

Saran Kaba Jones (Liberia | USA)Clean water advocate
Founder and CEO of FACE Africa, an NGO that strengthens clean water and sanitation infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa through innovative community support services.

Yasin Kakande (Uganda)Investigative journalist + author
Journalist working undercover in the Middle East to expose the human rights abuses of migrant workers there.

In one of her long-term projects, “The Three: Senior Love Triangle,” documentary photographer Isadora Kosofsky shadowed a three-way relationship between aged individuals in Los Angeles, CA – Jeanie (81), Will (84), and Adina (90). Here, Jeanie and Will kiss one day after a fight.

Adam Kucharski (UK)Infectious disease scientist
Infectious disease scientist creating new mathematical and computational approaches to understand how epidemics like Zika and Ebola spread, and how they can be controlled.

Lucy Marcil (USA)Pediatrician + social entrepreneur
Pediatrician and co-founder of StreetCred, a nonprofit addressing the health impact of financial stress by providing fiscal services to low-income families in the doctor’s waiting room.

Burçin Mutlu-Pakdil (Turkey | USA)Astrophysicist
Astrophysicist studying the structure and dynamics of galaxies — including a rare double-ringed elliptical galaxy she discovered — to help us understand how they form and evolve.

In “Birth of a Nation” (2015), artist Paul Rucker recast Ku Klux Klan robes in vibrant, contemporary fabrics like spandex, Kente cloth, camouflage and white satin – a reminder that the horrors of slavery and the Jim Crow South still define the contours of American life today. (Photo: Ryan Stevenson)

Claire Simeone (USA)Marine mammal veterinarian
Veterinarian and conservationist studying how the health of marine mammals, such as sea lions and dolphins, informs and influences both human and ocean health.

Senior Fellows embody the spirit of the TED Fellows program. They attend four additional TED events, mentor new Fellows and continue to share their remarkable work with the TED community.

Prosanta Chakrabarty (USA)Ichthyologist
Evolutionary biologist and natural historian researching and discovering fish around the world in an effort to understand fundamental aspects of biological diversity.

Aziza Chaouni (Morocco)Architect
Civil engineer and architect creating sustainable built environments in the developing world, particularly in the deserts of the Middle East.

A pair of shrimpfish collected in Tanzanian mangroves by ichthyologist Prosanta Chakrabarty and his colleagues this past year. They may represent an unknown population or even a new species of these unusual fishes, which swim head down among aquatic plants.

Zena el Khalil (Lebanon)Artist + cultural activist
Artist and cultural activist using visual art, site-specific installation, performance and ritual to explore and heal the war-torn history of Lebanon and other global sites of trauma.

Bektour Iskender (Kyrgyzstan)Independent news publisher
Co-founder of Kloop, an NGO and leading news publication in Kyrgyzstan, committed to freedom of speech and training young journalists to cover politics and investigate corruption.

An asteroid impact is the only natural disaster we have the technology to prevent, but since prevention takes time, we must search for near-Earth asteroids now. Astronomer Carrie Nugent does just that, discovering and studying asteroids like this one. (Illustration: Tim Pyle and Robert Hurt / NASA/JPL-Caltech)

David Sengeh (Sierra Leone + South Africa)Biomechatronics engineerResearch scientist designing and deploying new healthcare technologies, including artificial intelligence, to cure and fight disease in Africa.

Earlier this month, Merriam-Webster announced that 2017’s word of the year is feminism. Searches for the word on the dictionary website spiked throughout the year, beginning in January around the Women’s March, again after Kellyanne Conway said in an interview that she didn’t consider herself a feminist, and during some of feminism’s many pop culture moments this year. And the steady stream of #MeToo news stories have kept the word active in search over the past few weeks and months.

It’s not surprising, really. Think of it as one of the outcomes of the current moral crisis in the US and around the world — along with a growing awareness of the scope of the global epidemic of sexual harassment and acts of violence against women, the continuing challenges of underrepresentation in all decision-making positions and the misrepresentation of women and girls in media. I believe this moment presents an opportunity to enlist more women and men to step forward as feminists, to join the drive toward a world in which women feel safe at work and home and enjoy freedom to pursue their dreams and their potential for themselves, their families, communities and countries.

Still, I hear every day the question: “What does feminism actually mean?” According to Merriam-Webster, it’s “the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes” and “organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests.”

That’s a good elevator pitch, but it could use more perspective, more context. Over my seven years as curator and host of the TEDWomen conference, we’ve seen more than a few TED Talks take up the subject of feminism from many angles. Here are a dozen, chosen from the more than 150 TEDWomen talks published on TED.com and the TED Archive YouTube channels so far — including a bonus talk from the TEDx archive that kicked off a global conversation.

Looking ahead to 2018, I hope these talks can inform how we channel the new awareness and activism of 2017 into strategic decisions for women’s rights. Could we eliminate the gender gap in leadership? Could we eliminate economic, racial, cultural and gender inequities? Imagine these as goals for a newly energized and focused global feminist community.

What does it mean to be a millennial and a feminist in the 21st century? In her first TEDWomen talk, Courtney Martin admits that when she was younger, she didn’t claim the feminist label because it reminded her too much of her hippie mom and outdated notions of what it means to be a feminist. But in college, she changed her mind. Her feminism, she says, looks and sounds different from her mom’s version, but it’s not all that different underneath: feminist activism is on a continuum. While her mother talks about the patriarchy, Courtney talks about intersectionality and the ways that many other issues, such as racism and immigration, are part of the feminist equation. Blogging at Feministing.com, she says, is the 21st-century version of consciousness-raising.

Back in 2010 when we held the very first TEDWomen event in Washington, DC, one of our presenters was journalist Hanna Rosin. At the time, she was working on a book that came out in 2012 titled The End of Men. Her talk focused on a particular aspect of her research: how women were outpacing men in important aspects of American life, without even really trying. For instance, she found that for every two men who get a college degree, three women will do the same. Women, for the first time that year, became the majority of the American workforce. “The 200,000-year period in which men have been top dog,” she said, “is truly coming to an end, believe it or not.”

Now more than ever, it’s important to look boldly at the reality of race and gender bias — and understand how the two can combine to create even more harm. Kimberlé Crenshaw uses the term “intersectionality” to describe this phenomenon; as she says, if you’re standing in the path of multiple forms of exclusion, you’re likely to get hit by both. In this moving and informative talk, she calls on us to bear witness to the reality of intersectionality and speak up for everyone dealing with prejudice.

At the first TEDWomen in 2010, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg looked at why a smaller percentage of women than men reach the top of their professions — and offered three powerful pieces of advice to women aiming for the C-suite. Her talk was the genesis of a book you may have heard of: Lean In came out in 2013. In December of that year, we invited Sheryl to come back and talk about the revolution she sparked with Lean In. Onstage, Sheryl admitted to me that she was terrified to step onto the TED stage in 2010 — because she was going to talk, for the first time, about the lonely experience of being a woman in the top tiers of business. Millions of views (and a best-selling book) later, the Facebook COO talked about the reaction to her idea (watch video), and explored the ways that women still struggle with success.

Writer Roxane Gay says that calling herself a bad feminist started out as an inside joke and became “sort of a thing.” In her 2015 TEDWomen talk, she chronicles her own journey to becoming a feminist and cautions that we need to take into account all the differences — “different bodies, gender expressions, faiths, sexualities, class backgrounds, abilities, and so much more” — that affect us, at the same time we account for what we, as women, have in common. Sometimes she isn’t a perfect feminist — but as she puts it: “I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all.”

Alaa Murabit champions women’s participation in peace processes and conflict mediation. As a young Muslim woman, she is proud of her faith. But when she was a teenager, she realized that her religion (like most others) was dominated by men, who controlled the messaging and the policies created in their likeness. “Until we can change the system entirely,” she says, “we can’t realistically expect to have full economic and political participation of women.” She talks about the work she did in Libya to change religious messaging and to provide an alternative narrative which promoted the rights of women there.

Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright talks bluntly about being a powerful women in politics and the great advantage she feels in being a woman diplomat — because, as she puts it, “women are a lot better at personal relationships.” She talks about why, as a feminist, she believes that “societies are better off when women are politically and economically empowered.” She says she really dedicated herself to that, both at the UN and then as secretary of state. Far from being a soft issue, she says, women’s issues are often the very hardest ones, dealing directly with life and death.

In early 2016, Halla Tómasdóttir ran for president in Iceland and — surprising her entire nation (and herself) — she nearly won. Tómasdóttir believes that if you’re going to change things, you have to do it from the inside. Earlier in her career, she infused the world of finance with “feminine values,” which she says helped her survive the financial meltdown in Iceland. In her 2016 TEDWomen talk, she talks about her campaign and how she overcame media bias, changed the tone of the political debate and inspired the next generation of future women leaders along the way. “What we see, we can be,” she says. “It matters that women run.”

Women’s equality won’t just happen, says British comedian and activist Sandi Toksvig, not unless more women are put in positions of power. In a very funny, very smart TEDWomen talk (she is the host of QI after all), Toksvig tells the story of how she helped start a new political party in Britain, the Women’s Equality Party, with the express purpose of putting equality on the ballot. Now she hopes people — and especially women — around the world (US women, are you listening?) will copy her party’s model and mobilize for equality.

Poet, playwright, filmmaker and educator Chinaka Hodge uses her own life and experiences as the backbone of wildly creative, powerful works. In this incredible poem delivered before the 2016 election — that is perhaps even more stirring today given everything that has passed in 2017 — she asks the tough questions about a year that none of us will forget.

In this #MeToo moment, Gretchen Carlson, the author of Be Fierce, talks about what needs to happen next. “Breaking news,” she says, “the untold story about women and sexual harassment in the workplace is that women just want a safe, welcoming and harass-free environment. That’s it.” Ninety-eight percent of United States corporations already have sexual harassment training policies. But clearly, that’s not working. We need to turn bystanders into allies, outlaw arbitration clauses, and create spaces where women feel empowered and confident to speak up when they are not respected.

This TEDx talk started a worldwide conversation about feminism. In 2012 at TEDxEuston, writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explains why everyone — men and women — should be feminists. She talks about how men and women go through life with different experiences that are gendered — and because of that, they often have trouble understanding how the other can’t see what seems so self-evident. It’s a point even more relevant in the wake of this year’s #MeToo movement. “That many men do not actively think about gender or notice gender is part of the problem of gender,” Nigozi Adichie says. “Gender matters. Men and women experience the world differently. Gender colors the way we experience the world. But we can change that.”

As I mentioned, these are just a handful of the amazing, inspiring, thoughtful and smart women and the many ideas worth spreading, especially in these times when hope and innovative ideas are so necessary.

Happy 2018. Let’s make it a good one for women and for all us who proudly call ourselves feminists and stand ready to put ideas into actions.

At a workshop at TEDWomen 2017, the Brightline Initiative helped attendees parse the topic, “Why great ideas fail and how to make sure they don’t.” Photo: Stacie McChesney/TED

The Brightline Initiative helps leaders from all types of organizations build bridges between ideas and results. So they felt strong thematic resonance with TEDWomen 2017, which took place in New Orleans from November 1-3, and the conference theme of “Bridges.” In listening to the 50+ speakers who shared ideas, Brightline noted many that felt especially helpful for anyone who wants to work more boldly, more efficiently or more collaboratively.

]]>Brightline TEDWomen 2017tedstaffThe Big Idea: TED’s 4 step guide to the holiday seasonhttps://blog.ted.com/the-big-idea-teds-4-step-guide-to-the-holiday-season/
Thu, 21 Dec 2017 19:35:35 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=106723[…]]]>More charmingly referred to as a garbage fire that just keeps burning, 2017 has been a tough, relentless year of tragedy and strife. As we approach the holiday season, it’s important to connect and reconnect with those you love and want in your life. So, in these last few weeks of the year, here are a few ways to focus on building and honoring the meaningful relationships in your life.

1. Do some emotional housekeeping

Before you get into the emotional trenches with anyone (or walk into a house full of people you don’t agree with), check in with yourself. How you engage with your inner world drives everything from your ability to lead and moderate your mood, to your quality of sleep. Be compassionate and understanding of where you are in your life, internally and externally.

Psychologist Guy Winch makes a compelling case to practice emotional hygiene — taking care of our emotions, our minds, with the same diligence we take care of our bodies.

“We sustain psychological injuries even more often than we do physical ones, injuries like failure or rejection or loneliness. And they can also get worse if we ignore them, and they can impact our lives in dramatic ways,” he says. “And yet, even though there are scientifically proven techniques we could use to treat these kinds of psychological injuries, we don’t. It doesn’t even occur to us that we should. ‘Oh, you’re feeling depressed? Just shake it off; it’s all in your head. Can you imagine saying that to somebody with a broken leg: ‘Oh, just walk it off; it’s all in your leg.’”

Pay attention to emotional pain — recognize it when it happens and work to treat it before it feels all-encompassing. The body evolved the sensation of physical pain to alert us that something is wrong and we need to address it. The same is true for emotional pain. If a rejection, failure or bad mood is not getting better, it means you’ve sustained a psychological wound and you need to treat it. For example, loneliness can be devastatingly damaging to your psychological and physical health, so when you or your friend or loved one is feeling socially or emotionally isolated, you need to take action.

Monitor and protect your self-esteem. When you feel like putting yourself down, take a moment to be compassionate to yourself.Self-esteem is like an emotional immune system that buffers you from emotional pain and strengthens your emotional resilience. As such, it is very important to monitor it and avoid putting yourself down, particularly when you are already hurting. One way to “heal” damaged self-esteem is to practice self-compassion. When you’re feeling critical of yourself, do the following exercise: imagine a dear friend is feeling bad about him or herself for similar reasons and write an email expressing compassion and support. Then read the email. Those are the messages you should be giving yourself.

Find meaning in loss. Loss is a part of life, but it can scar us and keep us from moving forward if we don’t treat the emotional wounds it creates — and the holidays are normally a time when these wounds become sensitive or even reopen completely. If sufficient time has passed and you’re still struggling to move forward after a loss, you need to introduce a new way of thinking about it. Specifically, the most important thing you can do to ease your pain and recover is to find meaning in the loss and derive purpose from it. It might be hard, but think of what you might have gained from the loss (for instance, “I lost my spouse but I’ve become much closer to my kids”). Sometimes, being rejected by your friends and/or family also feels like loss. Consider how you might gain or help others gain a new appreciation for life, or imagine the changes you could make that will help you live a life more aligned with your values and purpose.

Learn what treatments for emotional wounds work for you. Pay attention to yourself and learn how you, personally, deal with common emotional wounds. For instance, do you shrug them off, get really upset but recover quickly, get upset and recover slowly, squelch your feelings, or …? Use this analysis to help yourself understand which emotional first aid treatments work best for you in various situations (just as you would identify which of the many pain relievers on the shelves works best for you). The same goes for building emotional resilience. Try out various techniques and figure out which are easiest for you to implement and which tend to be most effective for you. But mostly, get into the habit of taking note of your psychological health on a regular basis — and especially after a stressful, difficult, or emotionally painful situation.

Yes, practicing emotional hygiene takes a little time and effort, but it will seriously elevate your entire quality of life, the good doctor promises.

2. Sit down and have a chat

Friends are one thing; family, on the other hand, can be an entirely different (and potentially more stressful) situation. More than likely, it’s possible that you’ll get caught in a discussion that you don’t want to be a part of, or a seemingly harmless conversation that may take a frustrating turn.

There’s no reason to reinvent the conversation. But it’s useful to understand how to expertly pivot a talk between you and another person.

Radio host Celeste Headlee (TED Talk: 10 ways to have a better conversation) interviews people for her day job. As such, she accrued a helpful set of strategies and rules to follow when a discussion doesn’t go quite as planned. Check out her article (above) for insights on what to do when:

You want to go beyond small talk to have a meaningful conversation

An awkward silence happens and you don’t know what to say next

It seems like the other person isn’t listening

You start, or another person, starts a conversation that might end in an argument

You unintentionally offend someone

3. Make new memories while resurfacing old (good) ones

One of the best parts of getting everyone together for holidays or similar events is reminiscing, gathering around and talking about when your grandmother was young or that funny thing your cousin did when he was seven that no one is quite ready to let go of just yet. Resurfacing those moments everyone can enjoy, in one way or another, is a great way to fortify existing bonds and feel closer to loved ones. Who knows, from these stories, you may uncover ones never heard before.

Storycorps, a nonprofit whose founder, Dave Isay, won the 2015 TED Prize, is dedicated to preserving humanity’s cultural history through storytelling and has an expansive collection of great questions to ask just about anyone.

These questions are great for really digging into memories that are both cherished and important to preserve for generations to come. It may be interesting, fascinating and potentially emotional to hear about a loved one’s thoughts, feels and experiences from their lifetime.

For a good place to start, you can download the Storycorps app to start recording from your phone, which will you walk you through a few simple instructions. Then, you can start with these questions to warm-up the conversation:

What was your childhood like?

Tell me about the traditions that have been passed down through our family. How did they get started?

What are your most vivid memories of school?

How did you meet your wife/husband/partner?

What piece of wisdom or advice would you like to share with future generations?

4. Or if you’re far and can’t make it home to visit your friends and family regularly — get old fashioned.

With the speed and ease of email and texting, it may be hard to see the point in sitting down with a pen and paper.

But being abroad or unable to afford a ticket home is a reality that can feel equal parts isolating and emotionally-exhausting, no matter how many Skype sessions you have. Letter-writing is a lasting way to connect with your loved ones, a tangible collection of your thoughts and feelings at a specific point in your life. If you can’t always send home souvenirs, a thoughtful letter is a delightful, tangible reminder that you care — and helps the person on the receiving end just as much.

Lakshmi Pratury makes a beautiful case for letters to remember the people in your life, that they are a way to keep a person with you long after they’ve passed.

However, if family isn’t so big in your life for one reason or another, or you’d like to send some thoughtful words to someone who may needs them — write a letter to a stranger. The concept may sound strange, but the holiday season is habitually a rough one for those without close connections.

Hannah Brencher’s mother always wrote her letters. So when she felt herself bottom into depression after college, she did what felt natural — she wrote love letters and left them for strangers to find. The act has become a global initiative, The World Needs More Love Letters, which rushes handwritten letters to those in need of a boost. Brencher’s website will set you up with how to format your letter, who to write it to, and even the return address to write on the envelope.

The past few weeks have brimmed over with TED-related news. Here, some highlights:

This is what extinction looks like. Photographer Paul Nicklen shocked the world with footage of a starving polar bear that he and members of his conservation group SeaLegacy captured in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. “It rips your heart out of your chest,” Nicklen told The New York Times. Published in National Geographic, on Nicklen’s Instagram channel, and via SeaLegacy in early December, the footage and a photograph taken by Cristina Mittermeier spread rapidly across the Internet, to horrified reaction. Polar bears are hugely threatened by climate change, in part because of their dependence on ice cover, and their numbers are projected to drop precipitously in coming years. By publishing the photos, Nicklen said to the Times, he hoped to make a scientific data point feel real to people. (Watch Nicklen’s TED Talk)

Faster 3D printing with liquids. Attendees at Design Miami witnessed the first public demonstration of MIT’s 3D liquid printing process. In a matter of minutes, a robotic arm printed lamps and handbags inside a glass tank filled with gel, showing that 3D printing doesn’t have to be painfully slow. The technique upends the size constraints and poor material quality that have plagued 3D printing, say the creators, and could be used down the line to print larger objects like furniture, reports Dezeen. Steelcase and the Self-Assembly lab at MIT, co-directed by TED Fellow Skylar Tibbits and Jared Laucks, developed the revolutionary technique. (Watch Tibbits’ TED Talk)

The crazy mathematics of swarming and synchronization. Studies on swarming often focus on animal movement (think schools of fish) but ignore their internal framework, while studies on synchronization tend to focus solely on internal dynamics (think coupled lasers). The two phenomena, however, have rarely been studied together. In new research published in Nature Communications, mathematician Steven Strogatz and his former postdoctoral student Kevin O’Keefe studied systems where both synchronization and swarming occur simultaneously. Male tree frogs were one source of inspiration for the research by virtue of the patterns that they form in both space and time, mainly related to reproduction. The findings open the door to future research of unexplored behaviors and systems that may also exhibit these two behaviors concurrently. (Watch Strogatz’s TED Talk)

A filmmaker’s quest to understand white nationalism. Documentary filmmaker and human rights activist Deeyah Khan’s new documentary, White Right: Meeting the Enemy, seeks to understand neo-Nazis and white nationalists beyond their sociopolitical beliefs. All too familiar with racism and hate related threats in her own life, her goal is not to sympathize or rationalize their beliefs or behaviors. She instead intends to discover the evolution of their ideology as individuals, which can provide insights into how they became attracted to and involved in these movements. Deeyah uses this film to answer the question: “Is it possible for me to sit with my enemy and for them to sit with theirs?” (Watch Khan’s TED Talk)

The end of an era at the San Francisco Symphony. Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas announced that he will be stepping down from his role as music director of the San Francisco Symphony in 2020. In that year, he will be celebrating his 75th birthday and his 25th anniversary at the symphony, and although his forthcoming departure will be the end of an era, Thomas will continue to work as the artistic director for the New World Symphony at the training academy he co-founded in Miami. Thus, 2020 won’t be the last time we hear from the musical great, given that he intends to pick up compositions, stories, and poems that he’s previously worked on. (Watch Tilson Thomas’ TED Talk)

A better way to weigh yourself. The Shapa Smart Scale is all words, no numbers. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely helped redesign the scale in the hope that eliminating the tyranny of the number would help people make better decisions about their health (something we’re notoriously bad at). The smart scale sends a small electrical current through the person’s body and gathers information, such as muscle mass, bone density, and water percentage. Then, it compares it to personal data collected over time. Instead of spitting out a single number, it simply tells you whether you’re doing a little better, a little worse, much better, much worse, or essentially the same. (Watch Ariely’s TED Talk)

Have a news item to share? Write us at contact@ted.com and you may see it included in this biweekly round-up.

As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights.

A solo crossing of Antarctica. With chilling detail, Ben Saundersdocuments his journey across Antarctica as he attempts to complete the first successful solo, unsupported and unassisted crossing. The journey is a way of honoring his friend Henry Worsley, who died attempting a similar crossing last year. While being attacked by intense winds, Saunders writes of his experiences trekking through the hills, the cold, and the ice, the weight he carries, and even the moments he’s missing, as he wishes his dear friends a jolly and fun wedding day back home. (Watch Saunders’ TED Talk)

The dark side of AI. A chilling new video, “Slaughterbots,” gives viewers a glimpse into a dystopian future where people can be targeted and killed by strangers using autonomous weapons simply for having dissenting opinions. Thisviral video was the brainchild of TED speakerStuart Russell and a coalition of AI researchers and advocacy organizations. The videowarns viewers that while AI has the potential to solve many of our problems, the dangers of AI weapons must be addressed first. “We have an opportunity to prevent the future you just saw,” Stuart states at the end of the video, “but the window to act is closing fast.” (Watch Russell’s TED Talk)

Corruption investigators in paradise. Charmian Gooch and her colleagues at Global Witness have been poring over the Paradise Papers, a cache of 13.4 million files released by the the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists that detail the secret world of offshore financial deals. With the 2014 TED Prize, Gooch wished to end anonymously owned companies, and the Paradise Papers show how this business structure can be used to nefarious end. Check outGlobal Witness’ report on how the commodities company Glencore appears to have funneled $45 million to a notorious billionaire middleman in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to help them negotiate mining rights. Andtheir look at how a US-based bank helped one of Russia’s richest oligarchs register a private jet, despite his company being on US sanctions lists. (Watch Gooch’s TED Talk)

A metric for measuring corporate vitality. Martin Reeves, director of the Henderson Institute at BCG, and his colleagues have taken his idea thatstrategies need strategies and expanded it into the creation of theFortune Future 50, a categorization of companies based on more than financial data. Companies are divided into “leaders” and “challengers,” with the former having a market capitalization over $20 billion as of fiscal year 2016 and the latter including startups with a market capitalization below $20 billion. However, instead of focusing on rear-view analytics, BCG’s assessment uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing to review a company’s vitality, or their “capacity to explore new options, renew strategy, and grow sustainably,” according to apublication by Reeves and his collaborators. Since only 7% of companies that are market-share leaders are also profit leaders, the analysis can provide companies with a new metric to judge progress. (Watch Reeves’ TED Talk)

The boy who harnessed the wind — and the silver screen. William Kamkwamba’s story will soon reach the big screen via theupcoming filmThe Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. Kamkwamba built a windmill that powered his home in Malawi with no formal education. He snuck into a library, deciphered physics on his own, and trusted his intuition that he had an idea he could execute. His determination ultimately saved his family from a deadly famine. (Watch Kamkwamba’s TED Talk)

Have a news item to share? Write us at contact@ted.com and you may see it included in this biweekly round-up.

Legacy is a delightfully complex concept, and it’s one that the TED@Westpac curators took on with gusto for the daylong event held in Sydney, Australia, on Monday December 11th. Themed around the idea of “The Future Legacy,” the day was packed with 15 speakers and two performers and hosted by TED’s Cyndi Stivers and TED speaker and monster prime number aficionado Adam Spencer. Topics ranged from education to work-health balance to designer babies to the importance of smart conversations around death.

For Westpac managing director and CEO Brian Hartzer, the day was an opportunity both to think back over the bank’s own 200-year-legacy — and a chance for all gathered to imagine a bold new future that might suit everyone. He welcomed talks that explored ideas and stories that may shape a more positive global future. “We are so excited to see the ripple effect of your ideas from today,” he told the collected speakers before introducing Aboriginal elder Uncle Ray Davison to offer the audience a traditional “welcome to country.”

And with that, the speakers were up and running.

“Being an entrepreneur is about creating change,” says Linda Zhang. She suggests we need to encourage the entrepreneurial mindset in high-schoolers. (Photo: Jean-Jacques Halans / TED)

Ask questions, challenge the status quo, build solutions. Who do you think of when you hear the word “entrepreneur?” Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Bill Gates might come to mind. What about a high school student? Linda Zhang might just have graduated herself but she’s been taking entrepreneurial cues from her parents, who started New Zealand’s second-largest thread company. Zhang now runs a program to pair students with industry mentors and get them to work for 48 hours on problems they actually want to solve. The results: a change in mindset that could help prepare them for a tumultuous but opportunity-filled job market. “Being an entrepreneur is about creating change,” Zhang says. “This is what high school should be about … finding things you care about, having the curiosity to learn about those things and having the drive to take that knowledge and implement it into problems you care about solving.”

Should we bribe kids to study math? In this sparky talk, Mohamad Jebara shares a favorite quote from fellow mathematician Francis Su: “We study mathematics for play, for beauty, for truth, for justice, and for love.” Only problem: kids today, he says, often don’t tend to agree, instead finding math “difficult and boring.” Jebara has a counterintuitive potential solution: he wants to bribe kids to study math. His financial incentive plan works like this: his company charges parents a monthly subscription fee; if students complete their weekly math goal then the program refunds that amount of the fee directly into the student’s bank account; if not, the company pockets the profit. Ultimately, Jebara wants kids to discover math’s intrinsic worth and beauty, but until they get there, he’s happy to pay them. And this isn’t just about his own business model. “Unless we find a way to improve student engagement with mathematics, we’ll have not only a huge skills shortage crisis, but a fickle population easily manipulated by whoever can get the most airtime,” he says.

You, cancer and the workplace. When lawyer Sarah Donnelly was diagnosed with breast cancer, she turned to her friends and family for support — but she also sought refuge in her work. “My job and my coworkers would make me feel valuable and human at times when I would have otherwise felt like a statistic,” she says. “Work gave me focus and stability when I was dealing with so many unknowns and difficult personal decisions.” But, she says, not all employers realize that work can be a sanctuary for the sick, and often — believing themselves polite and thoughtful — cast out their employees. Now, Donnelly is striving to change the experiences of individuals coping with serious illness — and the perceptions others might have of them. Together with a colleague, she created a “Working with Cancer” toolkit that provides a framework and guidance for all those professionally involved in an employee’s life, and she is traveling to different companies around Australia to implement it.

Digital strategist Will Jenkins asks that we need to think about what we really want from life, not just our day-to-day. (Photo: Jean-Jacques Halans / TED)

The connection between time and money. We all need more time, says digital strategist Will Jenkins, and historically we’ve developed systems and technologies to save time for ourselves and others by reducing waste and inefficiency. But there’s a problem: even after spending centuries trying to perfect time-saving techniques, it too often still doesn’t feel like we’re getting anywhere. “As individuals, we’re busier than ever,” Jenkins points out, before calling for us to look beyond specialized techniques to think about what we actually really want from life itself, not just our day-to-day. In taking a holistic approach to time, we might, he says, channel John Maynard Keynes to figure out new ways that will allow all of us “to live wisely, agreeably, and well.”

Creating a digital future for Australia’s First People. Aboriginal Australian David Unaipon (1862-1967) was called his country’s Leonardo da Vinci — he was responsible for at least 19 inventions, including a tool that led to modern sheep shears. But according to Westpac business analyst Michael Mieni, we need to find better ways to encourage future Unaipons. Right now, he says, too many Indigenous Australians are on the far side of the digital divide, lacking access to computers and the Internet as well as basic schooling in technology. Mieni was the first Indigenous IT honors students at the University of Technology Sydney and he makes the case that tech-savvy Indigenous Australians are badly needed to serve as role models and teachers, as inventors of ways to record and promote their culture and as guardians of their people’s digital rights. “What if the next ground-breaking idea is already in the mind of a young Aboriginal student but will never surface because they face digital disadvantage or exclusion?” he asks. Everyone in Australia — not just the First Peoples — gains when every citizen has the opportunity and resources to become digitally literate.

The beauty of a dance duet. “Partner dance embodies the coming together of two people,” Shade Zahrai‘s voice whispers to a dark auditorium as she and her partner take the TED stage. In the middle of session one, the pair perform a gorgeous and sensual modern dance, complete with Zahrai’s recorded voiceover explaining the coordination and unity that partner dance requires of its participants.

The power of inclusiveness. Inclusion strategist Hayley Yeates shares how her identity as a proud Australian was dimmed by prejudice shown towards her by those who saw her as Asian. When in school, she says, fellow students didn’t want to associate with her in classrooms, while she didn’t add a picture to her LinkedIn profile for fear her race would deem her less worthy of a job. But Yeates focuses on more than the personal stories of those who’ve been dubbed an outsider, and makes the case that diversity leads to innovation and greater profitability for companies. She calls for us all to sponsor safe spaces where authentic, unrestrained conversations about the barriers faced by cultural minorities can be held freely. And she invites leaders to think about creating environments where people’s whole selves can work, and where an organization can thrive because of, not in spite of, its employees’ differences.

How to do yourself out of a job. As a sustainability practitioner, Olivia Tyler is trying hard to develop systems that will put her out of work. Why? For the good of us all, of course. And how? By encouraging all of us to ask questions about where what we buy, wear or eat comes from. Tyler tracks the fiendish complexity of today’s global supply chains, and she is attempting to develop smart technology that can allow both corporations and consumers to have the visibility they need to understand the buying decisions they make. When something as ostensibly simple as a baked good can include hundreds of data points about the ingredients it contains — a cake can be a minefield, she jokes — it’s time to open up the cupboard and use tech such as the blockchain to crack open the sustainability code. “We can adopt new and exciting ways to change the game on how we conduct ourselves as corporates and consumers across our increasingly smaller world,” she promises.

Can machine intelligence liberate human purpose? Much has been made of the threat robots place to the very existence of certain jobs, with some estimates reckoning that as much as 80% of low skill jobs have already been automated. Self-styled “datapreneur” Tomer Garzberg shares how he researched 11,000 of the world’s most widely held jobs to create the “Short-Term Automation Susceptibility Index” to identify the types of role that might be up for automation next. Perhaps unsurprisingly, highly specialized roles held by those such as neurosurgeons, chemical engineers and, well, acrobats face the least risk of being automated, while even senior blue collar positions or standard white collar roles such as pharmacists, accountants and health inspectors can expect a 25% shrinkage over the next 10 years. But Garzberg believes that we can — must — embrace this cybernated future.”Prepare your family to be okay with change, as uncomfortable as it may be,” he says. “We’ll likely be switching careers far more frequently in the near future.”

Everything’s gonna be alright. After a quick break and a breather, Westpac’s own Rowan Fitzpatrick and his band Heart of Mind played in session two with a sweet, uplifting rock ballad about better days and leaning on one another with love and hope. “Keep looking forward / Don’t lose your grip / One step at a time,” the trained jazz singer croons.

Alastair O’Neill shares the ethical wrangling his family undertook as they figured out how they felt about potentially eradicating a debilitating disease with gene editing. (Photo: Jean-Jacques Halans / TED)

You have the ability to end a hereditary disease. Do you take it? “Recently I had to sign a form promising that I wouldn’t have sex with my wife,” says a deadpan Alastair O’Neill as he kicks off the session’s talks. “Why? Because we decided to have a baby.” He waits a beat. “Let me rewind.” As the audience settles in for a rollercoaster talk of emotional highs and lows, he explains his family’s journey through the ethical minefield of embryonic genetic testing, also known as preimplantation genetic diagnosis or PGD. It was a journey prompted by a hereditary condition in his wife’s family — his father-in-law Phil had inherited the gene for retinal dystrophy and was declared legally blind at 30 years old. The odds that his own young family would have a baby either carrying or inheriting the disease were as low as one in two. In this searingly personal talk, O’Neill shares the ups and downs of both the testing process and the ethical wrangling that their entire family undertook as they tried to figure out how they felt about potentially eradicating a debilitating disease. Spoiler alert: O’Neill is in favor. “PGD gives couples the ability to choose to end a hereditary disease,” he says. “I think we should give every potential parent that choice.”

A game developer’s solution to the housing crisis. When Sarah Murray wanted to buy her first house, she discovered that home prices far exceeded her budget — and building a new house would be prohibitively costly and time-consuming. Frustrated by her lack of self-determination, Murray decided to create a computer game to give control back to buyers. The program allows you to design all aspects of your future home (even down to attention to price and environmental impact) and then delivers the final product directly to you in modular components that can be assembled onsite. Murray’s innovative idea both cuts costs and makes more sustainable dwellings; the first physical houses should be ready by 2018. But the digital housing developer isn’t done yet. Now she is working on adapting the program and investing in construction techniques such as 3D printing so that when a player designs and builds a home, they can also contribute to a home for someone in need. As she says, “I want to put every person who wants one in a home of their own design.”

Tough guys need mental-health help, too. In 2013 in Castlemaine, Victoria, painter and decorator Jeremy Forbes was shaken when a friend and fellow tradie (or tradesman), committed suicide. But what truly shocked him were the murmurs he overheard at the man’s wake — people asking, “Who’s next?” Tradies deal with the same struggles faced by many — depression, alcohol and drug dependency, gambling, financial hardship — but they often don’t feel comfortable opening up about them. “You’re expected to be silent in the face of adversity,” says Forbes. So he and artist Catherine Pilgrim founded HALT (Hope Assistance Local Tradies), a mental health awareness organization for tradie men and women, apprentices, builders, farmers, and their partners. HALT meets people where they are, hosting gatherings at hardware stores, football and sports clubs, and vocational training facilities. There, people learn about the warning signs of depression and anxiety and the available services. According to Forbes, who received a Westpac Social Change Fellowship in 2016, HALT has now held around 150 events, and he describes the process as both empowering and cathartic. We need to know how to respond if people are not OK, he says.

The conversation about death you need to have. “Most of us don’t want to acknowledge death, we don’t want to plan for it, and we don’t want to discuss it with the most important people in our lives,” says mortal realist and portfolio manager Michelle Knox. She’s got stats to prove it: 45% of people in Australia over the age of 18 don’t have a legal will. But dying without one is complicated and expensive for those left behind, and just one reason Knox believes it’s time we take ownership of our own deaths. Others include that talking about death before it happens can help us experience a good death, reduce stress on our loved ones, and also help us support others who are grieving. Knox experienced firsthand the power of talking about death ahead of time when her father passed away earlier this year. “I discovered this year it’s actually a privilege to help someone exit this life and although my heart is heavy with loss and sadness, it is not heavy with regret,” she says, “I knew what Dad wanted and I feel at peace knowing I could support his wishes.”

The philosophy of water. How do we find fulfillment in a world that’s constantly changing? IT strategy manager and “agent of flow” Raymond Tang struggled mightily with this question — until he came across the ancient Chinese philosophy of the Tao Te Ching. In it, he found a passage comparing goodness to water and, inspired, he’s now applying the concepts to his everyday life. In this charming talk, he shares three lessons he’s learned so far from the “philosophy of water.” First, humility: in the same way water helps plants and animals grow without seeking reward, Tang finds fulfillment and meaning in helping others overcome their challenges. Next, harmony: just as water is able to navigate its way around obstacles without force or conflict, Tang believes we can find a greater sense of fulfillment in our endeavors by shifting our focus away from achieving success and towards achieving harmony. Finally, openness: water can be a liquid, solid or gas, and it adapts to the shape in which it’s contained. Tang finds in his professional life that the teams most open to learning (and un-learning) do the best work. “What would water do?” Tang asks. “This simple and powerful question has changed my life for the better.”

With great data comes great responsibility. Remember the hacks on companies such as Equifax and JP Morgan? Well, you ain’t seen nothing yet. As computer technology becomes more powerful (think quantum) the systems we use to protect our wells of data become ever more vulnerable. However, there is still time to plan countermeasures against the impending data apocalypse, reassures encryption expert Vikram Sharma. He and his team are designing security devices and programs that also rely on quantum physics to power a defense against the most sophisticated attacks. “The race is on to build systems that will remain secure in the face of rapid technological advance,” he says.

Rach Ranton brings the leadership lessons she learned in the military to corporations, suggesting that leaders succeed when everyone knows the final goal they’re working toward. (Photo: Jean-Jacques Halans / TED)

Leadership lessons from the front line. How does a leader give their people a sense of purpose and direction? Rach Ranton spent more than a decade in the Australian Army, including tours of Afghanistan and East Timor. Now, she brings the lessons she learned in the military to companies, blending organizational psychology aimed at corporations with the planning and best practices of a well-oiled military unit. Even in a situation of extreme uncertainty, she says, military units function best if everyone understands the leader’s objective exactly as well as they understand their own role, not just their individual part to play but also the whole. She suggests leaders spend time thinking about how to communicate “commander’s intent,” the final goal that everyone is working toward. As a test, she asks: If you as a leader were absent from the scene, would your team still know what to do … and why they were doing it?

The stage at TED@IBM bubbles with possibilities … at the SFJAZZ Center, December 6, 2017, San Francisco, California. Photo: Russell Edwards / TED

We know that our world — our data, our lives, our countries — are becoming more and more connected. But what should we do with that? In two sessions of TED@IBM, the answer shaped up to be: Dream as big as you can. Speakers took the stage to pitch their ideas for using connected data and new forms of machine intelligence to make material changes in the way we live our lives — and also challenged us to flip the focus back to ourselves, to think about what we still need to learn about being human in order to make better tech. From the stage of TED@IBM’s longtime home at the SFJAZZ Center, executive Ann Rubin welcomes us and introduces our two onstage hosts, TED’s own Bryn Freedman and her cohost Michaela Stribling, a longtime IBMer who’s been a great champion of new ideas. And with that, we begin.

Giving plastic a new sense of value. A garbage truck full of plastic enters the ocean every minute of every hour of every day. Plastic is now in the food chain (and your bloodstream), and scientists think it’s contributing to the fastest rate of extinction ever. But we shouldn’t be thinking about cleaning up all that ocean plastic, suggests plastics alchemist David Katz — we should be working to stop plastic from getting there in the first place. And the place to start is in extremely poor countries — the origin of 80 percent of plastic pollution — where recycling just isn’t a priority. Katz has created The Plastic Bank, a worldwide chain of stores where everything from school tuition and medical insurance to Wi-Fi and high-efficiency stoves is available to be purchased in exchange for plastic garbage. Once collected, the plastic is sorted, shredded and sold to brands like Marks & Spencer and Henkel, who have commissioned the use of “Social Plastic” in their products. “Buy shampoo or detergent that has Social Plastic packaging, and you’re indirectly contributing to the extraction of plastic from ocean-bound waterways and alleviating poverty at the same time,” Katz says. It’s a step towards closing the loop on the circular economy, it’s completely replicable, and it’s gamifying recycling. As Katz puts it: “Be a part of the solution, not the pollution.”

How can we stop plastic from piling up in the oceans? David Katz has one way: He runs an international chain of stores that trade plastic recyclables for money. Photo: Russell Edwards / TED

How do we help teens in distress? AI is great at looking for patterns. Could we leverage that skill, asks 14-year-old cognitive developer Tanmay Bakshi, to spot behavior issues lurking under the surface? “Humans aren’t very good at detecting patterns like changes in someone’s sleep, exercise levels, and public interaction,” he says. “If some of the patterns from these suicidal teens go unrecognized and unnoticed by the human eye,” he suggests we could let technology help us out. For the last 3 years, Bakshi and his team have been working with artificial neural networks (ANNs, for short) to develop an app that can pick up on irregularities in a person’s online behavior and build an early warning systems for at-risk teens. With this technology and information access, they foresee a future where a diagnosis is given and all-encompassing help is available right at their fingertips.

An IBMer reads Tanmay Bakshi’s bio — to confirm that, yes, he’s just 14. At TED@IBM, Bakshi made his pitch for a social listening tool that could help identify teens who might be heading for a crisis. Photo: Russell Edwards / TED

A better way to manage refugee crises. When the Syrian Civil War broke out, Rana Novack, the daughter of Syrian immigrants, watched her extended family face an impossible choice: stay home and risk their lives, leave for a refugee camp, or apply for a visa, which could take years and has no guarantee. She quickly realized there was no clear plan to handle a refugee crisis of this magnitude (it’s estimated that there are over 5 million Syrian refugees worldwide). “When it comes to refugees, we’re improvising,” she says. Frustrated with her inability to help her family, Novack eventually struck on the idea of applying predictive technology to refugee crises. “I had a vision that if we could predict it, we could enable government agencies and humanitarian aid organizations with the right information ahead of time so it wasn’t such a reactive process,” she says. Novack and her team built a prototype that will be deployed this year with a refugee organization in Denmark and next year with an organization to help prevent human trafficking. “We have to make sure that the people who want to do the right thing, who want to help, have the tools and the information they need to succeed,” she says, “and those who don’t act can no longer hide behind the excuse they didn’t know it was coming.”

After her talk onstage at TED@IBM, Rana Novack continues the conversation on how to use data to help refugees. Photo: Russell Edwards / TED

What is information? It seems like a simple question, maybe almost too simple to ask. But Phil Tetlow is here to suggest that answering this question might be the key to understanding the universe itself. In an engaging talk, he walks the audience through the eight steps of understanding exactly what information is. It starts by getting to grips with the sheer complexity of the universe. Our minds use particular tools to organize all this sheer data into relevant information, tools like pattern-matching and simplifying. Our need to organize and connect things, in turn, leads us to create networks. Tetlow offers a short course in network theory, and shows us how, over and over, vast amounts of information tend to connect to one another through a relatively small set of central hubs. We’re familiar with this property: think of airline route maps or even those nifty maps of the internet that show how vast amounts of information ends up flowing through a few large sites, mainly Google and Facebook. Call it the 80/20 rule, where 80% of the interesting stuff arrives via 20% of the network. Nature, it turns out, forms the same kind of 80/20 network patterns all the time — in plant evolution, in chemical networks, in the way a tree branches out from a central trunk. And that’s why, Tetlow suggests, understanding the nature of information, and how it networks together, might give us a clue as to the nature of life, the universe, and why we’re even here at all.

Want to know what information is, exactly? Phil Tetlow does too — because understanding what information is, he suggests, might just help us understand why we exist at all. He speaks at TED@IBM. Photo: Russell Edwards / TED

Curiosity + passion = daring innovation. While driving to work in Johannesburg, South Africa, Tapiwa Chiwewe noticed a large cloud of air pollution he hadn’t seen before. While he’s not a pollution expert, he was curious — so he did some research, and discovered that the World Health Organization reported that nearly 14 percent of all deaths worldwide in 2012 were attributable to household and ambient air pollution, mostly in low- and middle-income countries. What could he do with his new knowledge? He’s not a pollution expert — but he is a computer engineer. So he paired up with colleagues from South Africa and China to create an air quality decision support system that lives in the cloud to uncover spatiotemporal trends of air pollution and create a new machine-learning technology to predict future levels of pollution. The tool gives city planners an improved understanding of how to plan infrastructure. His story shows how curiosity and concern for air pollution can lead to collaboration and creative innovation. “Ask yourself this: Why not?” Chiwewe says. “Why not just go ahead and tackle the problem head-on, as best as you can, in your own way?”

Tapiwa Chiwewe helped invent a system that tracks air pollution — blending his expertise as a computer engineer with a field he was not an expert in, air quality monitoring. He speaks at TED@IBM about using one’s particular set of skills to affect issues that matter. Photo: Russell Edwards / TED

What if AI was one of us? Well, it is. If you’re human, you’re biased. Sometimes that bias is explicit, other times it’s unconscious, says documentarian Robin Hauser. Bias can be a good thing — it informs and protects from potential danger. But this ingrained survival technique often leads to more harmful than helpful ends. The same goes for our technology, specifically artificial intelligence. It may sound obvious, but these superhuman algorithms are built by, well, humans. AI is not an objective, all-seeing solution; AI is already biased, just like the humans who built it. Thus, their biases — both implicit and completely obvious — influence what data an AI sees, understands and puts out into the world. Hauser walks through well-recorded moments in our recent history where the inherent, implicit bias of AI revealed the worst of society and the humans in it. Remember Tay? All jokes aside, we need to have a conversation about how AI should be governed and ask who is responsible for overseeing the ethical standards of these supercomputers. “We need to figure this out now,” she says. “Because once skewed data gets into deep learning machines, it’s very difficult to take it out.”

A mesmerizing journey into the world of plankton. “Hold your breath,” says inventor Thomas Zimmerman: “This is the world without plankton.” These tiny organisms produce two-thirds of our oxygen, but rising sea surface temperatures caused by climate change are threatening their very existence. This in turn endangers the fish that eat them and the roughly one billion people around the world that depend on those fish for animal protein. “Our carbon footprint is crushing the very creatures that sustain us,” says his thought partner, engineer Simone Bianco, “Why aren’t we doing something about it?” Their theory is that plankton are tiny and it’s really hard to care about something that you can’t see. So, the pair developed a microscope that allow us to enter the world of plankton and appreciate their tremendous diversity. “Yes, our world is based on fossil fuels, but we can adjust our society to run on renewable energy from the sun to create a more sustainable and secure future,” says Zimmerman, “That’s good for the little creatures here, the plankton, and that’s good for us.”

Thomas Zimmerman (in hat) and Simone Bianco share their project to make plankton more visible — and thus easier to care about and protect. Photo: Russell Edwards / TED

A poet’s call to protect our planet. “How can something this big be invisible?” asks IN-Q. “The ozone is everywhere, and yet it isn’t visible. Maybe if we saw it, we would see it’s not invincible, and have to take responsibility as individuals.” The world-renowned poet closed out the first session of TED@IBM with his original spoken-word poem “Movie Stars,” which asks us to reckon with climate change and our role in it. With feeling and urgency, IN-Q chronicles the havoc we’ve wreaked on our once-wild earth, from “all the species on the planet that are dying” to “the atmosphere we’ve been frying.” He criticizes capitalism that uses “nature as its example and excuse for competition,” the politicians who allow it, and the citizens too cynical to believe in facts. He finishes the poem with a call to action to anyone listening to take ownership of our home turf, our oceans, our forests, our mountains, our skies. “One little dot is all that we’ve got,” says IN-Q. “We just forgot that none of it’s ours; we just forgot that all of it’s ours.”

With guitar, drums and (expert) whistling, The Ferocious Few open Session 2 with a rocking, stripped-down performance of “Crying Shame.” The band’s musical journey from the streets of San Francisco to the big cities of the United States falls within this year’s TED@IBM theme, “Why not?” — encouraging musicians and others alike to question boundaries, explore limits and carry on.

Why the tech world needs more humanities majors. A few years ago, Eric Berridge’s software consultancy was in crisis, struggling to deal with a technical challenge facing his biggest client. When none of his engineers could solve the problem, they went to drown their sorrows and talk to their favorite bartender, Jeff — who said, “Let me talk to these guys.” To everyone’s surprise and delight, Jeff’s meeting the next day shifted the conversation completely, salvaged the company’s relationship with its client, and forever changed how Berridge thinks about who should work in the tech sector. At TED@IBM, he explained why tech companies should look beyond STEM graduates for new hires, and how people with backgrounds in the arts and humanities can bring creativity and unique insight into a technical workplace. Today, Berridge’s consulting company boasts 1,000 employees, only 100 of whom have degrees in computer programming. And his CTO? He’s a former English major/bike messenger.

Eric Berridge put his favorite bartender in a room with his biggest client — and walked out convinced that the tech sector needs to make room for humanities majors and people with multiple kinds of skills, not just more and more engineers. Photo: Russell Edwards / TED

The surprising and empowering truth about your emotions. “It may feel to you like your emotions are hardwired, that they just happen to you, but they don’t. You might believe your brain is pre-wired with emotion circuits, but it’s not,” says Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychology professor at Northeastern University who has studied emotions for 25 years. So what are emotions? They’re guesses based on past experiences that our brain generates in the moment to help us make sense of the world quickly, Barrett says. “Emotions that seem to happen to you are actually made by you,” she adds. For example, many of us hear our morning alarm go off, and as we wake up, we find ourselves enveloped by dread. We start thinking about all of our to-dos — the emails and calls to return, the drop-offs, the meals to cook. Our mind races, and we tell ourselves “I feel anxious” or “I feel overwhelmed.” This mind-racing is prediction, says Barrett. “Your brain is searching to find an explanation for those sensations in your body that you’re experiencing as wretchedness. But those sensations may have a physical cause.” In other words — you just woke up, maybe you’re just hungry. The next time you feel distressed, ask yourself: “Could this have a purely physical cause? Am I just tired, hungry, hot or dehydrated?” And we should be empowered by these findings, declares Barrett. “The actions and experiences that you make today become your brain’s predictions for tomorrow.”

In a mind-shifting talk, Lisa Feldman Barrett shares her research on what emotions are … and it’s probably not what you think., Photo: Russell Edwards / TED

Emotionally authentic relationships between AI and humans. “Imagine an AI that can know or predict what you want or need based on a sliver of information, the tone of your voice, or a particular phrase,” says IBM distinguished designer Adam Cutler. “Like when you were growing up and you’d ask your mom to make you a grilled cheese just the way you like it, and she knew exactly what you meant.” Cutler is working to create a bot that would be capable of participating in this kind of exchange with a person. More specifically, he is focusing on how to form an inside joke between machine and mortal. How? “Interpreting human intent through natural language understanding and pairing it with tone and semantic analysis in real time,” he says. Cutler contends that we humans already form relationships with machines — we name our cars, we refer to our laptops as being “cranky” or “difficult” — so we should do this with intention. Let’s design AI that responds and serves us in ways that are truly helpful and meaningful.

Adam Cutler talks about the first time he encountered an AI-enabled robot — and what it made him realize about his and our relationship to AI. Photo: Russell Edwards / TED

Can art help make AI more human? “We’re trying to create technology that you’ll want to interact with in the far future,” says artist Raphael Arar. “We’re taking a moonshot that we’ll want to be interacting with computers in deeply emotional ways.” In order for that future of AI to be a reality, Arar believes that technology will have to become a lot more human, and that art can help by translating the complexity of what it means to be human to machines. As a researcher and designer with IBM Research, Arar has designed artworks that help AI explore nostalgia, conversations and human intuition. “Our lives revolve around our devices, smart appliances, and more, and I don’t think this will let up anytime soon,” he says, “So I’m trying to embed more ‘humanness’ from the start, and I have a hunch that bringing art into an AI research process is a way to do just that.”

How can we make AI more human-friendly? Raphael Arar suggests we start with making art. Photo: Russell Edwards / TED

Where the body meets the mind. For millennia, philosophers have pondered the question of whether the mind and body exist as a duality or as part of a continuum, and it’s never been more practically relevant than it is today, as we learn more about the way the two connect. What can science teach us about this problem? Natalie Gunn studies both Alzheimer’s and colorectal cancer, and she wants to apply modern medicine and analytics to the mind-body problem. For her work on Alzheimer’s, she’s developing a blood test to screen for the disease, hoping to replace expensive PET scans and painful lumbar punctures. Her research on cancer is where the mind-body connection gets interesting: Does our mindset have an impact on cancer? There’s little conclusive evidence either way, Gunn says, but it’s time we took the question seriously, and put the wealth of analytical tools we have at our disposal to the test. “We need to investigate how a disease of the body could be impacted by our mind, particularly for a disease like cancer that is so steeped in our psyche,” Gunn says. “When we can do this, the philosophical question of where the body ends and the mind begins enters into the realm of scientific discovery rather than science fiction.”

Is Parkinson’s an electrical problem? Brain researcher Eleftheria Pissadaki studies Parkinson’s, but instead of focusing on the biological aspects of the disease, like genetics and dopamine depletion, she’s looking at the problem in terms of energy. Pissadaki and her team have created mathematical models of dopamine neurons, the neurons that selectively die in Parkinson’s, and they’ve found that the bigger a neuron is, the more vulnerable it becomes … simply because it needs a lot of energy. What can we do with this information? Pissadaki suggests we might someday be able to neuroprotect our brain cells by “finding the fuse box for each neuron” and figuring out how much energy it needs. Then we might be able to develop medicine tailored for people’s brain energy profiles, or drugs that turn neurons off whenever they’re getting tired but before they die. “It’s an amazingly complex problem,” Pissadaki says, “but one that is totally worth pursuing.”

Eleftheria Pissadaki is imagining new ways to think about and treat diseases like Parkinson’s, suggesting research directions that might create new hope. Photo: Photographer Russell Edwards / TED

How to build a smarter brain. Just as we can reshape our bodies and build stronger muscles with exercise, Bruno Michel thinks we can train our way to better, faster brains — brains smart enough to compete with sophisticated AI. At TED@IBM, the brain fitness advocate discussed various strategies for improving your noggin. For instance, to think in a more structured way, try studying Latin, math or music. For a boost to your general intelligence, try yoga, read, make new friends, and do new things. Or, try pursuing a specific task with transferable skills as Michel has done for 30 years. He closed his talk with the practice he credits with significantly improving both the speed of his thinking and his reaction times— tap dancing!

This billboard is showing up in streets around India, and it’s made out of pollution fumes that have been collected and made into ink — ink that’s, in turn, made into an image of TED Talks India: Nayi Soch host Shah Rukh Khan. Tune in on Sunday night, Dec. 10, at 7pm on Star Plus to see what it’s all about.

TED is a global organization with a broad global audience. With our TED Translators program working in more than 100 languages, TEDx events happening every day around the world and so much more, we work hard to present the latest ideas for everyone, regardless of language, location or platform.

Hosted and curated by Shah Rukh Khan, the TV series TED Talks India: Nayi Soch will premiere in India on Star Plus on December 10.

The name of the show, Nayi Soch, literally means ‘new ideas’ — and this kick-off episode seeks to inspire the nation to embrace and cultivate ideas and curiosity. Watch it and discover a program of speakers from India and the world whose ideas might inspire you to some new thinking of your own! For instance — the image on this billboard above is made from the fumes of your car … a very new and surprising idea!

If you’re in India, tune in at 7pm IST on Sunday night, Dec. 10, to watch the premiere episode on Star Plus and five other channels. Then tune in to Star Plus on the next seven Sundays, at the same time, to hear even more great talks on ideas, grouped into themes that will certainly inspire conversations. You can also explore the show on the HotStar app.

On TED.com/india and for TED mobile app users in India, each episode will be conveniently turned into five to seven individual TED Talks, one talk for each speaker on the program. You can watch and share them on their own, or download them as playlists to watch one after another. The talks are given in Hindi, with professional subtitles in Hindi and in English. Almost every talk will feature a short Q&A between the speaker and the host, Shah Rukh Khan, that dives deeper into the ideas shared onstage.

]]>TTI_blogsaba081217Brand-new TED Talks from TEDWomen 2017: A note from the curatorhttps://blog.ted.com/brand-new-ted-talks-from-tedwomen-2017-a-note-from-the-curator/
Fri, 01 Dec 2017 20:06:41 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=106614[…]]]>This year’s TEDWomen in New Orleans was a truly special conference, at a vital moment, and I’m sure the ripples will be felt for a long time to come. The theme this year was bridges: we build them, we cross them, sometimes we even burn them. Our speakers talked about the physical bridges we need for access and connection as well as the metaphoric ones we need to bridge the differences that increasingly divide us.

Along with the inspiring TED Talks and often game-changing ideas that were shared in the TEDWomen stage, my biggest take-away from this year’s conference was once again the importance of community and the opportunity this conference offers for women and a few good men from different countries, cultures, religions, backgrounds, from so many different sectors of work and experience, to come to together to listen, to learn, to connect with each other, to build their own bridges.

Take a look at all the presentations with our detailed speaker-by-speaker coverage on the TED Blog. Between sessions, we hosted four great Facebook Live conversations in the Blue Room, diving deeper into ideas from talks with WNYC’s Manoush Zomorodi. Catch up on them right here.

And we’re starting to post TED Talks from our event to share freely with the world. First up: Gretchen Carlson, whose timely talk about sexual harassment is relevant and resonant for so many women and men at this #MeToo moment. It’s already been viewed by over 800,000 people!

Gretchen calls on women who have experienced sexual harassment to “Be Fierce!” (also the title of her recent book). Luvvie Ajayi, in another TEDWomen Talk being released today, encourages not just women, but all of us to be courageous and to Speak Up when we have something to say, even if it makes others uncomfortable — especially if it makes the speaker uncomfortable. “I want us to leave this world better than we found it,” she told the audience in her hopeful and uplifting talk, “And how I choose to effect change is by speaking up, by being the first and by being the domino.”

And don’t miss Teresa Njoroge’s powerful talk on women in prison. At Clean Start Kenya, Njoroge builds bridges connecting the formerly imprisoned to the outside world and vice versa.

And one of the highlights of the conference for me, my conversation with Leah Chase, the Queen of Creole Cuisine. Chase’s New Orleans restaurant Dooky Chase changed the course of American history over gumbo and fried chicken. During the civil rights movement, it was a place where white and black people came together, where activists planned protests and where the police entered but did not disturb — and it continues to operate in the same spirit today. In our talk, she shares her wisdom from a lifetime of activism, speaking up and cooking.

Follow me on Facebook and Twitter for updates as we publish more TEDWomen 2017 videos in coming weeks and months. And please share your thoughts with me here in the comments about TEDWomen, these videos and ideas you have for speakers at TEDWomen 2018. We’re always looking for great ideas!

Humanity is defined by its immense body of knowledge. Most times it inches forward, shedding light onto the mysteries of the universe and easing life’s endeavors in small increments. But in some special moments, knowledge and understanding leap forward, when one concentrated mind or one crucial discovery redirects the course of things and changes the space of possibilities.

TED and Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, have partnered to help surface and share brilliant ideas, innovations — and breakthroughs. At the inaugural TED@Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany event, hosted by TED International Curator Bruno Giussani at Here East in London on November 28, 16 brilliant minds in healthcare, technology, art, psychology and other fields shared stories of human imagination and discovery.

A molecular superglue made from flesh-eating bacteria. The bacteria Streptococcus pyogenes — responsible for diseases including strep throat, scarlet fever and necrotizing fasciitis (colloquially, flesh-eating disease) — has long, hair-like appendages made of proteins with a unique property: the ends of these proteins are linked by an incredibly strong chemical bond. “You can boil them, try to cut them with enzymes or throw them in strong acids and bases. Nothing happens to them,” says biochemist Bijan Zakeri. Along with his adviser Mark Howarth, Zakeri figured out a way to engineer these proteins to create what he describes as a molecular superglue. The superglue allows us to assemble new protein shapes, and “you can chemically link the glue components to other organic and inorganic molecules, like medicines, DNA, metals and more, to build new nano-scale objects that address important scientific and medical needs,” Zakeri says.

What if we could print electronics? “We must manufacture devices in a whole new way, with the electronics integrated inside the object, not just bolted in afterwards,” says advanced technologist Dan Walker. He introduces us to his vision of the fast approaching future of technology, which could take two potential paths: “The first is hyper-scale production, producing electrically functional parts along the standard centralized model of manufacturing. Think of how we print newspapers, ink on paper, repeating for thousands of copies. Electronics can be printed in this way, too.” he says. Walker designs inks that conduct electricity and can be used to print functional electronics, like wires. This ink can be used in inkjet printers, the sort that can be found in most offices and homes. But these inkjet printers are still 2D printers — they can print the electronics onto the object, but they can’t print the object itself. “The second way the manufacturing world will go is towards marrying these two techniques of digital printing, inkjet and 3D, and the result will be the ability to create electrically functional objects,” Walker explain, both unique objects bespoke for individual customers and perfect replicas printed off by the thousands.

Strategic marketer Hannah Bürckstümmer explains her work developing organic photovoltaics — and how they might change how we power the world. (Photo: Paul Clarke / TED)

A printable solar cell. Buildings consume about 40 percent of our total energy, which means reducing their energy consumption could help us significantly decrease our CO2 emissions. Solar cells could have a big role to play here, but they’re not always the most aesthetically pleasing solution. Strategic marketer Hannah Bürckstümmer is working on a totally different solar cell technology: organic photovoltaics. Unlike the solar cells you’re used to seeing, these cells are made of compounds that are dissolved in ink and can be printed using simple techniques. The result is a thin film that absorbs the energy of the sun. The solar module looks like a plastic foil and is low weight, flexible and semi-transparent. It can be used in this form or combined with conventional construction materials like glass. “With the printing process, the solar cell can change its shape and design very easily,” Bürckstümmer says, displaying a cell onstage. “This will give the flexibility to architects, to planners and building owners to integrate this electricity-producing technology as they wish.” Plus, it may just help buildings go from energy consumers to energy providers.

A robot that can grab a tomato without crushing it. Robots are excellent at many tasks — but handling delicate items isn’t one of them. Carl Vause, CEO of Soft Robotics, suggests that instead of trying to recreate the human hand, roboticists should instead seek inspiration from other parts of nature. Consider the octopus: it’s very good at manipulating items, wrapping its tentacles around objects and conforming to their shapes. So what if we could get robots to act like an octopus tentacle? That’s exactly what a group of researchers at Harvard did: in 2009, they used a composite material structure, with rubber and paper, to create a robot that can conform to and grasp soft objects. Demoing the robot onstage, Vause shows it can pick up a bath sponge, a rubber duck, a breakfast scone and even a chicken egg. Why is this important? Because until now, industries like agriculture, food manufacturing and even retail have been largely unable to benefit from robots. With a robot that can grasp something as soft as a tomato, we’ll open up whole industries to the benefits of automation.

Departing from rules can be advantageous — and hilarious. In between jokes about therapy self-assessment forms, hair salons and box junctions, human nature explorer James Veitch questions the rules and formalities people are taught to respect throughout life. An avid email and letter writer, Veitch is unafraid and unapologetic in voicing his concerns about anyone whose actions fall in line with protocols but out of line with common sense. To this effect, he questions Jennifer, a customer relations team member at Headmasters Salon, as to why he and his friend Nige received comparable haircuts when they booked appointments with different types of stylists: Nige with a Senior Stylist (who cost 34 Euros) and Veitch with a Master Hair Consultant (who cost 54 Euros). Using percentages and mathematics, and even inquiring into the reasons why Nige received a biscuit and he didn’t, Veitch argues his way into a free haircut. Though Veitch is clearly enjoying himself by questioning protocols, he derives more than amusement from this process — as he shows us how departing from rules and formalities can be advantageous and hilarious, all at once.

If we can’t fight our emotions, why not use them? Emotions are as important in science as they are in any other part of our lives, says materials researcher Ilona Stengel. The combination of emotion and logical reasoning is crucial for facing challenges and exploring new solutions. Especially in the scientific world, feelings are just as necessary as facts and logic for paving the way to breakthroughs, discoveries and cutting-edge innovations. “We shouldn’t be afraid of using our feelings to implement and to catalyze fact-based science,” Stengel says. Stengel insists that having a personal, emotional stake in the work that you do can alter your progress and output in an incredibly positive way, that emotions and logic do not oppose, but complement and reinforce each other. She asks us all — whether we’re in or outside of the science world — to reflect on our work and how it might give us a sense of belonging, dedication and empowerment.

TED International Curator Bruno Giussani, left, speaks with Scott Williams about the important role informal caregivers play in the healthcare system. (Photo: Paul Clarke / TED)

Putting the “care” back in healthcare. Once a cared-for patient and now a caregiver himself, Scott Williams asks us to recognize the role that informal caregivers — those friends and relatives who go the extra mile out of love — play in healthcare systems. Although they don’t administer medication or create treatment plans for patients, informal caregivers are instrumental in helping people return to good health, Williams says. They give up their jobs, move into hospitals with patients, know patients’ medical histories and sometimes make difficult decisions for them. Williams suggests that without informal caregivers, “our health and social systems would crumble, and yet they’re largely going unrecognized.” He invites us to recognize their selfless work — and their essential value to the smooth functioning of healthcare systems.

Tiffany Watt Smith speaks about the fascinating history of how we understand our emotions. (Photo: Paul Clarke / TED)

Yes, emotions have a history. When we look to the past, it’s easy to see that emotions changed — sometimes very dramatically — in response to new cultural expectations and new ideas about gender, ethnicity, age and politics, says Tiffany Watt Smith, a research fellow at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at the Queen Mary University of London. Take nostalgia, which was defined in 1688 as homesickness and seen as being deadly. It last appeared as a cause of death on a death certificate in 1918, for an American soldier fighting in France during WWI. Today, it means something quite different — a longing for a lost time — and it’s much less serious. This change was driven by a shift in values, says Watt Smith. “True emotional intelligence requires we understand the social, political, cultural forces that have shaped what we’ve come to believe about our emotions and understand how they might still be changing now.”

Dispelling myths about the future of work. “Could machines replace humans?” was a question once pondered by screenwriters and programmers. Today, it’s on the minds of anybody with a job to lose. Daniel Susskind, a fellow in economics at Oxford University, kicked off Session 2 by tackling three misconceptions we have about our automated future. First: the Terminator myth, which says machines will replace people at work. While that might sometimes happen, Susskind says that machines will also complement us and make us more productive. Next, the intelligence myth, which says some tasks can’t be automated because machines don’t possess the human-like reasoning to do them. Susskind dispels this by explaining how advances in processing power, data storage and algorithms have given computers the ability to handle complex tasks — like diagnosing diseases and driving cars. And finally: the superiority myth, which says technological progress will create new tasks that humans are best equipped to do. That’s simply not true, Susskind says, since machines are capable of doing different kinds of activities. “The threat of technological unemployment is real,” he declares, “Yet it is a good problem to have.” For much of our history, the biggest problem has been ensuring enough material prosperity for everyone; global GDP lingered at about a few hundred dollars per person for centuries. Now it is $10,150, and its growth shows no signs of stopping. Work has been the traditional way in which we’ve distributed wealth, so how should we do it in a world when there will be less — or even no — work? That’s the question we really need to answer.

A happy company is a healthy company, says transformation manager Lena Bieber. She suggests that we factor in employee happiness when we think about — and invest in — companies. (Photo: Paul Clarke / TED)

Investing in the future of happiness. Can financial parameters like return on equity, cash flow or relative market share really tell us if a company is fundamentally healthy and predict its future performance? Transformation manager Lena Bieber thinks we should add one more indicator: happiness. “I would like to see the level of happiness in a company become a public indicator — literally displayed next to their share price on their homepages,” she says. With the level of happiness so prominent, people could feel more secure in the investments they’re making, knowing that employees of certain companies are in good spirits. But how does one measure something so subjective? Bieber likes the Happy Planet Index (a calculation created by TED speaker Nic Marks), which uses four variables to measure national well-being — she suggests that it can be translated for the workplace to include factors such as average longevity on the job and perceived fairness of opportunities. Bieber envisions a future where we invest not just with our minds and wallets, but with hearts as well.

Seeing intellectual disability through the eyes of a mom. When Emilie Weight’s son Mike was diagnosed with fragile X syndrome, an intellectual disability, it changed how she approached life. Mike’s differences compelled her to question her inner self and her role in the world, leading her to three essential tools that she now benefits from. Mindfulness helps her focus on the positive daily events that we often overlook. Mike also reminds Emilie of the importance of time management to use the time that she has instead of chasing it. Lastly, he’s taught her the benefit of emotional intelligence through adapting to the emotions of others. Emilie believes in harnessing the powers of people with intellectual disabilities: “Intellectually disabled people can bring added value to our society,” she says, “Being free of the mental barriers that are responsible for segregation and isolation, they are natural-born mediators.”

Christian Wickert suggests three ways that we can tap into the power of fiction — and how it could benefit our professional lives. (Photo: Paul Clarke / TED)

Can fiction make you better at your job? Forget self-help books; reading fiction might be the ticket to advancing your career. Take it from Christian Wickert, an engineer focusing on strategy and policy, who took a creative writing course — a course, he believes, that sharpened his perception, helped him understand other people’s motivations, and ultimately made him better at his job. Wickert explores three ways fiction can improve your business skills. First, he says, fiction helps you identify characters, their likes, dislikes, habits and traits. In business, this ability to identify characters can give you tremendous insights into a person’s behavior, telling you when someone is playing a role versus being authentic. Second, fiction reminds us that words have power. For example, “sorry” is a very powerful word, and when used appropriately it can transform a situation. Finally, fiction teaches you to look for a point of view — which in business is the key to good negotiation. So the next time you have a big meeting coming up, Wickert concludes, prepare by writing — and let the fiction flow.

How math can help us answer questions about our health. Mathematician Irina Kareva translates biology into mathematics, and vice versa. As a mathematical modeler, she doesn’t think about what things are but instead about what things do — about relationships between individuals, whether they’re cells, animals or people. Take an example: What do foxes and immune cells have in common? They’re both predators, except foxes feed on rabbits and immune cells feed on invaders, such as cancer cells. But from a mathematical point of view, the same system of predator-prey equations will describe both interactions between foxes and rabbits and cancer and immune cells. Understanding the dynamics between predator and prey — and the ecosystem they both inhabit — from a mathematical point of view could lead to new insights, specifically in the development of drugs that target tumors. “The power and beauty of mathematical modeling lies in the fact that it makes you formalize in a very rigorous way what we think we know,” Kareva says. “It can help guide us as to where we should keep looking, or where there might be a dead end.” It all comes down to asking the right question, and translating it to the right equation, and back.

End-to-end tracking of donated medicine. Neglected tropical diseases, or NTDs, are a diverse group of diseases that prevail in tropical and subtropical conditions. Globally, they affect more than one billion people. A coalition of pharmaceutical companies, governments, health organizations, charities and other partners, called Uniting to Combat Neglected Tropical Diseases, is committed to fighting NTDs using donated medicines — but shipping them to their destination poses complex problems. “How do we keep an overview of our shipments and make sure the tablets actually arrive where they need to go?” asks Christian Schröter, head of Pharma Business Integration at Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany. Currently, the coalition is piloting a shipping tracker for their deliveries — similar to the tracking you receive for a package you order online — that tracks shipments to the first warehouse in recipient countries. This year, they took it a step further and tracked the medicines all the way to the point of treatment. “Still, many stakeholders would need to join in to achieve end-to-end tracking,” he says. “We would not change the amount of tablets donated, but we would change the amount of tablets arriving where they need to go, at the point of treatment, helping patients.”

Why we should pay doctors to keep people healthy. Most healthcare systems reimburse doctors based on the kind and number of treatments they perform, says business developer Matthias Müllenbeck. That’s why when Müllenbeck went to the dentist with a throbbing toothache, his doctor offered him a $10,000 treatment (which would involve removing his damaged tooth and screwing an artificial one into his jaw) instead of a less expensive, less invasive, non-surgical option. We’re incentivizing the wrong thing, Müllenbeck believes. Instead of fee-for-service health care, he proposes that we reimburse doctors and hospitals for the number of days that a single individual is kept healthy, and stop paying them when that individual gets sick. This radical idea could save us from unnecessary costs and risky procedures — and end up keeping people healthier.

The music of TED@Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany. During the conference, music innovator Tim Exile wandered around recording ambient noises and sounds: a robot decompressing, the murmur of the audience, a hand fumbling with tape, a glass of sparkling water being poured. Onstage, he closes out the day by threading together these sounds to create an entirely new — and strangely absorbing — piece of electronic music.

The speed of change is a constant in our lives. Sometimes it’s worth slowing things down, to look at what might be changing without us even considering it.

To celebrate the efforts of innovators, change-makers and dreamers who are reimagining the future, TED has partnered with BMW i. In a special session of talks hosted by TED design curator Chee Pearlman and TED science curator David Biello at TED HQ in New York City on Thursday night, five speakers (and three remarkable performers) explored how we might shape future through creativity and imagination.

Acoustic duo Anielle and Matthewkicked off the evening with a performance of their original song “Dead Romance,” weaving together the sounds of Americana folk music and modern pop.

Systems engineer and researcher Danielle Wood shares six ways technologies developed for space exploration can lead to better, more sustainable development on earth. (Photo: Jasmina Tomic/TED)

Justice and development through space.Danielle Wood leads the Space Enabled research group at the MIT Media Lab, where she works to break down the idea that space is for the few, the rich or the elite. She identifies six space technologies that can contribute to sustainable development across the world. First, communication satellites can be essential during times of disaster, when regular communication networks malfunction. Likewise, scientists use positioning satellites to study endangered species and track their movements, and they use earth observation satellites to measure features of our environment such as the temperature of the ocean. Next, the diet and exercise regimens used by astronauts living in orbiting laboratories like the International Space Station help us learn more about how to improve health on earth. Space spinoff includes the inventions created for space that can transfer to other fields outside space technology. Finally, adventures in space can serve as inspiration for people across the globe to develop new skills in science and technology. “Space truly is useful for sustainable development for the benefit of all peoples,” Wood says.

The future of shared mobility and public transportation. Shared mobility architect Sandra Phillips has helped launch car-sharing programs in several countries, bridging the gap between homes and distant subway stations while benefiting the environment and community. The idea is simple: “Essentially, you become a member of a club and gain access to different types of shared vehicles. You only use them when you need them, and you pay for what you use,” Phillips says. In practice, this looks like using a shared car or bike to get to the nearest transit station, instead of relying on your own car. In a study conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, researchers found that in the five cities where carsharing service Car2Go was tested, some 28,000 cars were removed from the roads, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and opening up space for parks, libraries and other community hubs. Phillips believes this is possible because car-sharing brings together the inclusive social mandate of public transportation and the innovation behind private mobility companies. While it may not be the solution for congestion in large cities, in places like Vancouver and Sacramento, having access to car-sharing could transform how people get around.

The dark side of our beautiful lawns. Americans think of our lawns as lush, green, living carpets that we proudly display in front of our homes. But they’ve become one of the most high-maintenance — and damaging — of accessories. In the US, lawns cover more than 40 million acres, making them our largest irrigated crop, says landscape architect Edwina von Gal. We shower them with billions of gallons of water (half of which is wasted) and douse them with chemicals. “The typical lawn uses two to four times more fertilizers and pesticides per square foot than crops,” says von Gal. These chemicals have been linked to human diseases like cancers, endocrine system and nervous system disorders, allergies and asthma; they harm our waterways, marine life, insects and birds; and they’re decimating the soil biome, the beneficial microbes in the dirt. But we don’t have to give up our lawns, says von Gal: “We just need to work with nature, not against it.” Her advice is simple: water seldom but water deep; mow high; let clippings and leaves serve as compost and mulch; and let nature happen. “We need to think about whether we’re walking across a toxic lawn to get to our patch of organic kale,” von Gal says.

Adventures in thrift. In an age where everything feels replaceable and planned obsolescence is a genuine business strategy, materials scientist Andrew Dent wants us to consider a powerful idea: thrifting. There is no “away,” Dent says; when we discard something (as we do to the tune of 1.3 billion tons of waste per year globally) it ends up in ever-growing landfills. But we can get smarter about the way we make, and remake, our products, he says. From consumer electronics made of nanocellulose, bulletproof materials made from synthetic spider silk and enzymes that can help make plastic infinitely recyclable, Dent shares exciting examples of thrift and advances in material science in action. “If you make anything, think about how that product could be potentially used for a second life, or a third life,” Dent says. “Design the ability for your products to be taken apart.”

Radical neighborliness. In 2009, journalist and screenwriter Drew Philp bought a ruined house in Detroit for $500. But in the years that followed, as he gutted the interior and removed the heaps of garbage crowding the rooms, he learned less about repairing a house than about building a community. Six decades of decline, plus a rapid exodus in the past ten years, have left a chunk of Detroit the size of San Francisco empty and abandoned. But those who’ve stayed put, Philp says, have formed the kinds of neighborhoods and city streets where people want to live. Philp calls the camaraderie he sees at work in Detroit “radical neighborliness,” and he thinks this principle “may provide the answers to cities struggling everywhere and looking to re-invent themselves.” In a tribute to the city he loves, Philp makes the case that we do have “the power to create the world anew, together, and to do it ourselves when our governments refuse.”

Wonder, illusion and magic. Set to a lively hip-hop beat, then a slower more sentimental accompaniment, illusionist and magic designer Andrew Evans enraptured the audience in the night’s closing performance. With dynamism and charisma, Evans amazed the crowd with a series of enchanting illusions, inviting people to see what can happen if you just let yourself believe. “I’d much prefer people walk away with thoughts beyond the stage,” he says, “wondering what other things in the world might deserve a closer look.”